Colonial Judicial Legacy as a Latent Challenge for the Adoption of Algorithmic Sentencing in African Courts

The pace at which Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming the face of almost every human activity cannot be ignored or overemphasized. The impacts of AI range from health, finance, telecommunication, agriculture, and security to education, administrative decision-making, etc. The judiciary is not exempted, with some countries experimenting with the use of AI algorithms in judicial decision-making, including criminal sentencing. Thus, some jurisdictions are shuttling between traditional human judges to AI algorithmic predictive justice. China may be topping the list of jurisdictions that have since embraced the use of AI in criminal trial procedures, including bail, probation, parole, and sentencing. AI tools like “Little Judge Bao” are used to provide sentencing recommendations and assist judges in making decisions based on big data and predictive algorithms. In the U.S., one such program, “COMPAS,” has been used in assistive judicial decision-making by some United States courts despite facing controversies.