Featuring Professor Ngozi Okidegbe, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law

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"Discredited Data" 

Abstract:

Jurisdictions are increasingly employing pretrial algorithms as a solution to the racial and socioeconomic inequities in the bail system. But in practice, pretrial algorithms have reproduced the very inequities they were intended to correct. Scholars have diagnosed this problem as the biased data problem: pretrial algorithms generate racially and socioeconomically biased predictions, because they are constructed and trained with biased data.

This Article contends that biased data is not the sole cause of algorithmic discrimination. Another reason pretrial algorithms produce biased results is that they are exclusively built and trained with data from carceral knowledge sources – the police, pretrial services agencies, and the court system. Redressing this problem will require a paradigmatic shift away from carceral knowledge sources toward non-carceral knowledge sources. This Article explores knowledge produced by communities most impacted by the criminal legal system (“community knowledge sources”) as one category of non-carceral knowledge sources worth utilizing. Though data derived from community knowledge sources have traditionally been discredited and excluded in the construction of pretrial algorithms, tapping into them offers a path toward developing algorithms that have the potential to produce racially and socioeconomically just outcomes.

Ngozi Okidegbe is an Assistant Professor of Law at Cardozo School of Law, where she first joined as the inaugural holder of the Harold A. Stevens Visiting Assistant Professorship in 2019.

She researches and writes in the areas of criminal procedure, critical race theory evidence, technology, and racial justice. Her work explores the ways in which the use of predictive technologies in the criminal justice system impacts racially marginalized communities. 

Before joining Cardozo, Professor Okidegbe served as a law clerk for Justice Madlanga of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and for the Justices of the Court of Appeal for Ontario. She also practiced at CaleyWray, a labor law boutique in Toronto.

Professor Okidegbe graduated with a B.C.L./LL.B from McGill University’s Faculty of Law, where she was awarded the Edwin Botsford Busteed Scholarship, the Rosa B. Gualtieri Prize, the Daniel Mettarlin Memorial Scholarship, and the Schull Yang Award. She subsequently earned her LL.M from Columbia Law School, where she graduated as a James Kent Scholar. Professor Okidegbe’s articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Criminal Law Quarterly, Kansas Journal of Law & Public Policy, Connecticut Law Review and Cornell Law Review.

The CJR Workshop Series offers a forum for academics to share works-in-progress. Workshop registrations are limited to facilitate productivity and engagement. 

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