Muslims and the courtroom: Legal issues and empirical research
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On April 22, 2013, a doctoral student at the Universite de Sherbrooke named Chiheb Esseghaier was arrested on allegations of engaging in terrorist plotting (O'Toole et al. 2013). Despite the seriousness of the allegations made against him, the devout Muslim was unable to procure legal representation. Although he had successfully applied for legal aid, no lawyer had agreed to represent him due to his unusual request: Esseghaier insisted on counsel who would assist him in 'chang[ing] the reference of his judgment' to the Qur'an rather than the Criminal Code of Canada (Gillis 2013). Specifically, Esseghaier argued that he would not accept representation by any lawyer who would not agree that he has the right to be tried by 'the holy book'. rather than a 'book witten by humans'. At the time of the writing of this chapter, he is still searching for a lawyer who will take his case, yet most legal scholars agree that his request is an impossible one. Among other things, the Esseghaier case highlights a number of important issues relating to the degree to which Islam may play a role in the courtroom. As such this chapter seeks to provide an overview of these issues through (1) a discussion of the increasing number of trial-specific areas where evidence and/or information relating to the Muslim faith has been identified, (2) a review of the sparse empirical literature examining the confluence of law and the social sciences with regard to the role that religious orientation may play in trials with a Muslim connection, and (3) a discussion of the apparent disconnect between many of the legal issues and social scientific research as well as a review of potential future areas that require empirical analysis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".