How to get away with drug trafficking

Can an AI system help acquit you of drug charges? I'm not a lawyer, but just like the fictional Mike Ross taking the Bar exams without a law degree, I set out to build one anyway. Long story short, I used OpenAI models to read 97 Supreme Court cases about drug trafficking over the last 40 years:

Note: The following is a screenshot of the spreadsheet with synthetic data -- here is the Google Sheets link. 

Here are some insights I learned:

The Supreme Court acquitted about half of the drug trafficking cases it heard.

53.61% or 52 out of 97 cases from 1984 to 2024

The top five legal defenses (or as I like to call them, the loopholes) are the following:​

1. Insufficiency of Evidence
- used 18 times​
- accepted by the court 72.22% of the time

2. Chain of Custody​
- used 46 times
- acceptance rate: 71.74%

3. Denial​
- used 28 times
- acceptance rate: 50.00%

4. Violation of Constitutional Rights​
- used 26 times
- acceptance rate: 46.15%

5. Frame-up​
- used: 47 times
- acceptance rate: 42.55%​

However, when the Supreme Court rejects those same defenses, you are almost guaranteed of being guilty:

1. Chain of Custody Rule
- used 13 times in 'guilty' cases
- when rejected by the court, client is guilty 100% of the time​

2. Frame-up​
- used 24 times in 'guilty' cases
- when rejected by the court, client is guilty 100% of the time

3. Denial​
- used 14 times in 'guilty' cases
- when rejected by the court, client is guilty 85.71% of the time

4. Violation of Constitutional Rights​
- used 12 times in 'guilty' cases
- when rejected by the court, client is guilty 91.66% of the time

5. Insufficiency of Evidence​
- used 12 times in 'guilty' cases
- when rejected by the court, client is guilty 83.33% of the time ​

The bottomline is that even though two 'loopholes' have a higher than half chance of being accepted by the court, once they are rejected, you are almost guaranteed to get sent to the locker.

It's therefore extremely important that if your legal team decides to use these defenses, they need to be absolutely certain their arguments are iron-clad.

This necessity now leads to the exciting part -- the AI lawyer.