Judge More Likely to Grant Parole After Lunch

Want to get a parole? Have your attorney schedule your parole hearing after lunch. A new study revealed that the timing of a parole hearing is quite crucial in determining the outcome.

As a case study, one of the judges started in the morning by granting parole to about 65 percent of the prisoners; that percentage dropped to near zero by the end of the first session, then rebounded to about 65 percent after the snack break. The same pattern repeated in the second and third sessions.

The researchers suggest that as the number of rulings in a session increase, the judges become mentally fatigued. Once their mental resources are depleted, the judges are more likely to simplify their decisions. Ruling in favor of the status quo—denying parole—is the "easier" decision, the authors argue, since these rulings take generally take less time and require shorter written verdicts. After taking a break, their faculties are restored, and they are more likely to make "harder" decisions and grant parole requests again.

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Everyone is biased, even full Juries can be biased. As Erich Fromm famously wrote in The Sane Society: "It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas or feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing is further from the truth... Just as there is a folie à deux there is a folie à millions. The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane."

Personally, I think most of us are insane which makes juries just as pathetic.
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And this is why all legal judgements other than the jury should remove the human element. Judges, by rights, should just be computers that take in the exact same facts and output the exact same response. No feelings should ever come into it.
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