Ken Strutin

Legal education, information technology and law practice add up to an expensive thinking machine. So, the right to counsel means access to a million-dollar brain—the product of natural and artificial intelligences. Now that lawyers have been upgraded by technology, the right to counsel needs upgrading as well.

Computer-cultivated lawyers are a generation pledged to palm-sized devices with million volume libraries, while AI moves from predicting recidivism to judging guilt. See Ken Strutin, “Automatic Justice: Shaping the Legal Mind of Tomorrow,” LLRX, June 4, 2017.

The state's attorney enters a courtroom armed with a law degree, an arsenal of digital assets, and countless hours reading, arguing and practicing law, their competence scaled to technology forbidden to the unrepresented prisoner.