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Artificial brain predicts death-row executions

By Paul Marks

25 June 2008

New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

WHICH inmates on death row will eventually be executed? Many never make the final journey from prison cell to execution chamber – but nobody really understands who will be spared.

Until now. A new computer system can predict which death row prisoners will live and which will be killed – with chilling accuracy. And its dispassionate analysis has confirmed suspicions that the people most likely to be executed are those who have had the least schooling, rather than those who have committed the most heinous crimes.

The US, the only western democracy to retain the death penalty, executes only a small proportion…

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