Bad Calls Kill People
Why Judges Need Their Own ABS System
Bad Calls Kill People: Why Judges Need Their Own ABS System
By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com
May 12, 2026
The strongest arguments are not the ones protected from scrutiny.
They are the ones that survive it.
That sounds obvious. But when it comes to the American judiciary, we have built large parts of the system around the opposite principle:
maximum discretion,
minimum accountability,
and almost total insulation from downstream consequences.
Meanwhile, the public watches the same pattern unfold over and over again:
repeat offender arrested
repeat offender released
repeat offender escalates
innocent person harmed or killed
institutional language becomes vague and procedural afterward
At some point, people stop seeing isolated mistakes.
They start seeing a system problem.
The public increasingly asks a very simple question:
Why is nearly every profession affecting human life subjected to escalating performance accountability systems — except judges making high-risk release decisions?
Pilots are monitored.
Surgeons are reviewed.
Police wear body cameras.
Engineers sign liability documents.
Even Major League Baseball umpires now face real-time performance correction.
Which brings us to one of the more fascinating developments of 2026:
MLB’s Automated Ball-Strike challenge system.
Baseball did not replace umpires with robots.
It did something smarter.
It introduced visible accountability.
Players can challenge calls.
Technology reviews the pitch instantly.
Missed calls become measurable.
Patterns become visible.
Accuracy improves.
The game survives.
In fact, the game improves.
And fans love it. Why? Because it feels more fair now.
Bob put it more simply:
“Funny how people tighten up when somebody starts keeping score.”
Exactly.
The principle matters far beyond baseball.
Measurement changes behavior.
In software engineering, my field, we call this stress-testing the weakest link. You do not wait for catastrophic production failure before examining flawed assumptions. You apply adversarial pressure early, while corrections are still possible.
That is how resilient systems are built.
Modern criminal justice increasingly feels designed in the opposite direction.
Judges make life-altering release decisions using:
criminal histories
prior failures to appear
violent-offense records
parole violations
risk assessments
escalating behavioral patterns
Then the headlines arrive.
Repeat offender released.
Woman assaulted.
Cop shot.
Elderly man shoved onto subway tracks.
Family killed by habitual drunk driver.
Child raped by predator already known to the system.
Then comes the institutional cleanup language afterward:
“complex circumstances”
“balancing equities”
“judicial discretion”
“insufficient detention authority”
The victims absorb the consequences permanently.
The judge usually absorbs a press release.
This is not really a debate about punishment versus compassion.
It is a debate about feedback loops.
Healthy systems require feedback.
Unhealthy systems suppress it.
And right now, many Americans believe parts of the judiciary have become dangerously insulated from outcome-based feedback.
The public understands something many elite institutions increasingly struggle to admit:
Patterns matter.
If one violent offender slips through the cracks, people understand that.
If the same jurisdiction repeatedly releases escalating violent offenders who repeatedly reoffend, people stop calling that compassion.
They start calling it negligence.
The statistics help explain why.
Rearrest rates among released offenders remain extraordinarily high over time, particularly among repeat and violent offenders. Meanwhile, many jurisdictions continue experimenting with:
reduced bail standards
early-release policies
downgraded charging
reduced sentencing
catch-and-release frameworks
The public keeps hearing the same promises:
rehabilitation,
equity,
reform,
decarceration.
Then they watch the same names cycle back through the headlines.
At some point, citizens begin asking whether the system is optimizing for public safety at all.
Critics immediately invoke “judicial independence.”
Fair enough.
Let’s address that directly.
Judicial independence matters.
A healthy judiciary cannot function under constant partisan intimidation.
But independence and total insulation are not the same thing.
No serious system can repeatedly release escalating violent offenders, watch innocent people get hurt afterward, and still pretend the decision-maker bears no meaningful responsibility.
And despite media portrayals, accountability proposals are no longer fringe concepts.
The 2025 JAIL Act and the Judicial Accountability for Public Safety Act both attempted to carve out narrow civil-liability exposure for grossly negligent release decisions involving repeat violent offenders.
Not broad ideological punishment.
Not political retaliation.
Targeted accountability tied to objective public-risk outcomes.
That distinction matters.
Now opponents argue this would create defensive judging:
maximum sentencing
over-incarceration
“cover-your-ass” rulings
Some of that concern is legitimate.
Human behavior is probabilistic.
Not every released offender reoffends.
Not every high-risk defendant escalates.
But that argument cuts both ways.
Right now, many citizens believe the system suffers from the opposite distortion:
systematic underweighting of repeat-risk behavior until tragedy occurs.
And unlike baseball, the consequences here are not blown playoff games.
They are women raped by predators already cycling through the courts.
Police officers shot by suspects with endless prior arrests.
Families buried because habitual offenders were given “one more chance.”
Neighborhoods slowly surrendered to people the system keeps insisting are low-risk.
Bob looked at one particularly ugly repeat-offender case and shook his head:
“If your dog bites five people, they take the dog away. But some judges keep turning loose violent felons like they’re handing out parking validations.”
Crude?
Maybe.
But the public mood is moving rapidly in that direction.
The deeper issue here is institutional asymmetry.
Modern criminal justice heavily audits procedural fairness toward defendants while often weakly auditing downstream public-risk outcomes.
That imbalance is becoming politically unsustainable.
And technology is quietly making the old insulation model harder to maintain.
Today we can track:
recidivism
release outcomes
violent escalation patterns
repeat-offender trajectories
judicial release histories
The data infrastructure already exists.
What does not yet exist is the political willingness to expose the patterns publicly and systematically.
That is where the ABS analogy becomes powerful.
The goal is not robotic sentencing.
The goal is visible accountability pressure.
Possible reforms are not difficult to imagine:
public judicial outcome dashboards
violent recidivism tracking by release category
mandatory written findings for high-risk releases
catastrophic-failure review boards
stronger recall mechanisms for elected judges
narrow civil liability for gross negligence
public transparency databases
None of this eliminates judicial discretion.
It simply subjects discretion to measurable downstream review.
Which is exactly what modern high-consequence professions increasingly face everywhere else.
That is the real issue here:
institutional durability.
An exception-seeking mind notices patterns quickly.
Insulated institutions tend to optimize for internal approval rather than external resilience. Over time, negative feedback gets moralized away, criticism becomes socially dangerous, and measurable failure patterns accumulate until public trust starts collapsing.
The judiciary is not immune to this dynamic.
No institution is.
And the public’s patience is clearly running thinner.
Bad calls on the ball field cost runs.
Bad calls on the bench cost lives.
The public has been keeping score for a long time now.
It may finally be time for the judges to do the same.
Well, I have never been a judge and cannot speak directly about what that job is like. But we all see the revolving-door problem in many big cities, and we know instinctively that something is wrong.
There has to be some space between ‘throw the bums out’ and ‘let people do whatever they want.’
What I am suggesting is greater visibility and easier ways to assess repeat, pattern-based outcomes — including how often violent crimes are later committed by offenders who were released early, repeatedly diverted, or never jailed at all.
That is only a first step. As several readers have already pointed out, we need to understand how pervasive the problem actually is before we can solve it.
Doing nothing, however, is not a serious option. Too many innocent lives have already been broken.
By the way, the ABS system is working great in baseball. Attendance is way up! Americans love a fair system.
Three strikes and you are out. I vote for a system that shows the public just how bad certain judges’ records are. Make it painfully obvious. Then get rid of them. We can’t go on like this. Public will not tolerate it.