www.TexasBailNews.com

House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee Members

Representative,

I am writing to you regarding HB 20 by Murr which we anticipate will be set for a hearing in the next few weeks.  I am writing to raise three issues regarding the use of risk assessments.  First, risk assessments have lost all of the support that they built.  More than 100 Civil Rights, Digital Justice, and Community-Based Organizations distributed a press release raising concerns about pretrial risk assessments.  You can find the press release with the following link:

https://civilrights.org/2018/07/30/more-than-100-civil-rights-digital-justice-and-community-based-organizations-raise-concerns-about-pretrial-risk-assessment/.

Second, since the last legislative session, there have been multiple studies released concluding that risk assessments should not be a part of criminal justice reform.  

Mayson, Bias In, Bias Out, University of Georgia School of Law (September 2018).  You can see the article with this link-  

https://pbtx.com/files/2019/12/Mayson_p5g2tz2m.pdf.

Technical Flaws of Pretrial Risk Assessments Raise Grave Concerns

Signed Statement of Concern from 27 Leading Academics, July 2019.  You can see the statement with the following link-  https://pbtx.com/files/2019/12/TechnicalFlawsOfPretrial_ML_site.pdf.

Finally, since the last legislative session, the largest digital companies in the world issued a joint statement arguing that risk assessments should not be a part of criminal justice reform.  The companies including Google, Facebook and others argued that risk assessments were great at prediciting what groups would do, but were terrible at predicting what individuals would do.  The companies recommended that risk assessments should not be a part of criminal justice reform.  You can see the report at the following link:

https://pbtx.com/files/2019/12/Report-on-Algorithmic-Risk-Assessment-Tools_(3).pdf.

I am asking you to vote against HB 20 since it uses a risk assessment.

Call to Action No. 2