Tag Archives: trials

Artificial Intelligence to help Judges write and decide rulings

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Important Takeaways:

  • Consider this: England’s 1,000-year-old legal system — wigs, robes and all — is giving judge’s permission to ‘use artificial intelligence to help produce rulings’
  • Yes, you read that right
  • “The Courts and Tribunals Judiciary last month said AI could help write opinions but stressed it shouldn’t be used for research or legal analyses because the technology can fabricate information and provide misleading, inaccurate and biased information.
  • ‘Judges do not need to shun the careful use of AI’, said Master of the Rolls Geoffrey Vos, the second-highest ranking judge in England and Wales. ‘But they must ensure that they protect confidence and take full personal responsibility for everything they produce’.”
  • S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts did address artificial intelligence usage in his annual report, but the federal court system in America has no guidance on AI.
  • US State and county courts, furthermore, are too fragmented for a universal approach.
  • Cary Coglianese, law professor at the University of Pennsylvania: “’It is certainly one of the first, if not the first, published set of AI-related guidelines in the English language that applies broadly and is directed to judges and their staffs’, Coglianese said of the guidance for England and Wales. ‘I suspect that many, many judges have internally cautioned their staffs about how existing policies of confidentiality and use of the internet apply to the public-facing portals that offer ChatGPT and other such services’
  • The danger of the technology has already manifested itself in the infamous incident where two New York lawyers relied on ChatGPT to write a legal brief that quoted fictional cases. The two were fined by an angry judge who called the work they had signed off on ‘legal gibberish’.

Read the original article by clicking here.

For Yazidis, Baghdadi’s death ‘doesn’t feel like justice yet’

For Yazidis, Baghdadi’s death ‘doesn’t feel like justice yet’
By Raya Jalabi

SHARYA CAMP, Iraq (Reuters) – Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s death will mean nothing to 19-year-old rape victim Jamila unless the Islamic State militants who enslaved her are brought to justice.

Jamila, who asked not to be identified by her last name, is one of thousands of women from the Yazidi minority religion who were kidnapped and raped by IS after it mounted an assault on the Yazidi homeland in northern Iraq in August 2014.

“Even if Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is dead, it doesn’t mean Islamic State is dead,” Jamila told Reuters outside the tent that is now her temporary home in the Sharya camp for displaced Yazidis in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region.

“This doesn’t feel like justice yet,” she said. “I want the men who took me, who raped me, to stand trial. And I want to have my voice heard in court. I want to face them in court … Without proper trials, his death has no meaning.”

Baghdadi, who had led IS since 2010, detonated a suicide vest after being cornered in a raid by U.S. special forces in northwest Syria, U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Sunday.

Inspired by his edicts to enslave and slaughter Yazidis, whom IS regard as infidels, his followers shot, beheaded and kidnapped thousands in a rampage which the United Nations called a genocidal campaign against them.

Along with thousands of other women and children, Jamila said she was enslaved by the militants and kept in captivity for five months in the city of Mosul along with her sister.

She was just 14 when she was seized. But her problems did not end after she and her sister managed to escape when, she said, their guards were high on drugs.

“When I first came back, I had a nervous breakdown and psychological problems for two years, so I couldn’t go to school,” she said.

Now instead of working or catching up on her years of lost schooling, she looks after her mother, with whom she shares her cramped tent at the camp.

“My mother can’t walk and has health problems so I have to stay and take care of her because my older siblings are in Germany,” she said.

NO PLANS TO GO HOME

The prospect of going home to Sinjar in northern Iraq is not an option for Jamila, and many others. The city still lies in ruin four years after the IS onslaught, and suspicion runs deep in the ethnically mixed area.

“Sinjar is completely destroyed. Even if we could go back, I wouldn’t want to because we’d be surrounded by the same Arab neighbors who all joined IS in the first place, and helped them kill us (Yazidis),” she said.

Thousands of men are being tried in Iraqi courts for their ties to IS. Iraq has so far not allowed victims to testify in court, something community leaders and human rights groups say would go a long way in the healing process.

“It is deplorable that not a single victim of Islamic State’s horrific abuses including sexual slavery has gotten their day in court,” said Belkis Wille, Iraq Researcher for Human Rights Watch. “Iraq’s justice system is designed to allow the state to exact mass revenge against suspects, not provide real accountability for victims.”

For some of the nearly 17,000 Yazidis at the Sharya camp, Baghdadi’s death was a first step in that direction though they fear the IS fighters who are still alive.

Mayan Sinu, 25, can dream of a new life after the camp as she and her three children have been granted asylum by Australia. But she also wants the men who shot her husband in the legs and dragged him off to be brought to justice. He has been missing since the incident five years ago.

“I hope Baghdadi is suffering more than we ever did, and my God we suffered,” said Sinu. “I wish he (Baghdadi) hadn’t blown himself up so I could have slaughtered him myself with my bare hands.”

(Editing by Timothy Heritage)

The Trial of Your Faith (Pt. 13)

Early 1991 –

Christmas was over now, the new year was about to begin, and I was a year older.  I was studying the words of Jesus and asking the Lord to answer many of the tough questions with which I had always grappled but had never taken the time to truly seek answers for.  Now I had the time.  Of course, one of the questions that still occupied my thoughts frequently was, “How long, oh Lord?  How long will I have to stay in prison?”

With my appeal now in the hands of the judges, Tammy Faye was hoping and praying for a speedy release.  I was not quite so optimistic.  One of us was about to be proved right.

January 1991 was the beginning of one of my worst downhill slides into one of the worst periods of depression I had known since coming to prison.  Although I had encouraged my family to stay away at Christmas, I missed them horribly.  Despite being surrounded by hundreds of fellow prisoners, I felt alone and abandoned.  It was not my family’s fault that I spent Christmas, New Year’s Eve, and my birthday alone.  Yet it was the first Christmas of my life that I had not celebrated with my family.  It was the first time I had not been with my family on my birthday.  My emotions took a nosedive.

Adding to my depression was the news from Charleston, South Carolina, that I had lost another legal battle and I learned that I would not be receiving “good time” for the work I did in prison on a smoking cessation class.  This was huge to me because “good time” could help you get out of prison sooner.

I did not want to do anything.  I did not want to eat, drink, shave, or bathe.  I began to allow myself to become more and more disheveled and unkempt, making little to no effort to clean up.  I began to grow a beard, not because I thought it would enhance my appearance, but because I no longer cared about my appearance.  Always known as a fastidious dresser – even in prison I wore sharply pressed clothes, with crisp creases in my shirts and pants – my clothes now went unpressed and often unwashed.  With my hair uncombed, my body unwashed, and stubble covering my face, I looked like a homeless person.  Friends and foes alike who were accustomed to seeing me on the set of PTL well dressed with every hair in place would have had difficulty recognizing me.

I was in the pits.

Surprisingly, at a time when I was at a low point in my prison experience, having lost all hope of ever getting out soon, I received one letter after another exhorting me to keep trusting God and to keep believing that He would bring me out of prison much earlier than I anticipated.  As always, their words were a tremendous encouragement to me, and their rich spiritual insights were extremely helpful.  Nevertheless, I could not overcome the desire to simply give up and die.

In a letter I received from Tammy Faye near the end of January, she included a list on which members of our congregation in Florida routinely wrote down their prayer requests, asking for the other members of the church to pray for them.  On the last Sunday morning of January, there among all the other requests on the list, in his own handwriting, was the name “Jay Bakker.”  Beside his name in the prayer request column, Jamie had printed only two words:  My Dad.

When I saw the unadorned prayer request of my boy, I burst into tears.

Looking back, I can see where God always had something to keep me going when all hope was seemingly gone.  This time was no different.

The Trial of Your Faith (Pt. 11)

Hansel’s words (and the Spirit of God through them) were insistent.

We cannot overcome loneliness by trying to escape it.  We must lean into it, and thereby transform it into solitude.*  We must not just keep trying to avoid the loneliness by constant distraction.  He is here.  He is here.  He is here.  We must push through the loneliness to joy.

Tim Hansel taught me how to turn my loneliness into solitude with God.  What a difference!  “Loneliness,” says Tim, “parches our lips for the living God, makes us hungry for His presence.  I learned that:

Loneliness is feeling alone.  Solitude is being alone.  Loneliness feels frantic.  Solitude is still and focused.  Loneliness focuses on external circumstances.  Solitude focuses on the inner adventure.  Loneliness relies on what others think and say about you.  Solitude relies on what God says about you and to you.**

At this point in my life Through the Wilderness of Loneliness impacted me second only to the Bible.  No other book has been more useful to me.  The transformation did not come quickly or easily for me.  I still felt as though I had not heard from God in several years.

In early 1980, I had sinned seriously, but when I repented and sought God’s forgiveness, I knew He was there.  I knew He forgave me, whether other people chose to believe that or not, or whether they chose to forgive me or not.  God continued to use my life and seemed to bless everything I set out to do in His name.  The ministry kept getting bigger and bigger.  Then, after the disclosure of my sin and my subsequent departure from PTL, nothing I tried to do in God’s name bore any fruit.  Nothing worked.  I tried to start another television program in Charlotte.  It didn’t work.  I tried to begin again in Florida; that also soon fell apart.  Everything I tried turned to dung.

What do you do when God doesn’t hear you? Where does a person go who feels that God doesn’t want him anymore?

Even though God had blessed me so much in the past, I began to think, Is there no hope for me?  Were my detractors correct?  I relived the words of my accusers almost every day.***  I thought, Well, maybe my sins were too awful.  Maybe I hurt other people and the kingdom of God so badly that my sins were beyond God’s willingness to forgive me.

The words Tammy and I had said so many times at the close of our television programs, “God loves you; He really does!” now haunted me.

Finally, as I read Hansel’s book, I felt like there might be hope.  I renewed my cries to God.  “God, please talk to me! Show me something, anything, just please let me know that You care, and that You haven’t given up on me.”

*Do you avoid being alone?  Are you comfortable spending the day with just you (and Jesus)?

** What has Jesus said to you in your times of solitude with Him?

*** What is the spiritual principle behind Matthew 12:37 “by your words you are justified, and by your words you are condemned?”