Public safety, individual liberty, and suspect science: future dangerousness assessments and sex offender laws
Bibliographic record
Abstract
... Part V offers a review of case law involving the role of the two actuarial assessment tools in SVP status cases, \nincluding an assessment of how courts have responded to Daubert-and Frye-based challenges to the instruments. ... \nHence, with the Supreme Court's approval of expert predictions of future violence in death penalty cases, and with the \nmajority's reference to expert assessments of the risk of violence in civil commitments, it seems reasonable to \nextrapolate Barefoot's general conclusion to future dangerousness assessments of sex offenders. ... To develop the \nexperience table, the developer used the sexual recidivism rates observed in seven follow-up studies of released sex \noffenders in the United States, Canada, and England. ... The STATIC-99 instrument includes 10 static factors : Age at \nassessment: Number of prior sentencing 0 = 25 years or older dates: 1 = between 18 and 25 years 0 = 3 or less 1 = 4 or \nmore Having lived with an age-appropriate Any convictions for a non- intimate partner for at least 2 years: contact \nsexual offense: 0 = yes; 1 = no 0 = no; 1 = yes Any convictions for an Index non-sexual Any nonfamilial victims: \nviolent offense: 0 = no; 1 = yes 1 = yes; 0 = no Any convictions for non-sexual violence Any stranger victims: before \nthe Index (most recent sexual 0= no; 1 = yes offense) offense: 1 = yes; 0 = no Number of prior sex offenses: Any male \nvictims: 0 = none 0 = no; 1 = yes 1 = 1-2 charges or 1 conviction 2 = 3-5 charges or 2-3 convictions 3 = > 6 charges or \n> 4 convictions For STATIC-99, total scores range from 0 to 12, arranged within seven risk categories organized into \nfour ordinal risk groups (from 0 = low risk to 6+ = high risk). ... It is highly questionable whether there ever was - and \neven more questionable whether there is today - a general acceptance in the mental health field about the validity of \nusing actuarial risk assessments in SVP legal determinations. ... Judicial Perspectives on Future Dangerousness \nEvidence Since the Supreme Court approved mental health testimony about future dangerousness and found civil \ncommitment of sexual predators and registration laws to be constitutional, the introduction of actuarial risk assessments \nthrough expert testimony has become common practice in SVP determinations. ... In the case, the prosecutor had \nargued that even low scores from actuarial tools are sufficient to constitute the legal standard of "likely" to reoffend: \nEven taking the expert's tests, the RRASOR, about 11% failure rate after ten years. ... And, finally, some argue that the legislatures created sexual predator laws with the future dangerousness concept and, thus, we (mental health experts, \njudges, and lawyers) need to use the best available evidence to make those decision - even if the legal standards remain \nvague, and even though current models of actuarial risk assessment suffer large gaps in validity and reliability.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".