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27 Colum. Sci. & Tech. L. Rev. 1 (2026)

handle is hein.journals/cstlr27 and id is 1 raw text is: HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT THE COLUMBIA SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY LAW REVIEW VOLUME 27 STLR.ORG NUMBER 1 ARTICLE HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF PROSECUTORIAL BIAS IN Al LEGAL ANALYSIS Rory Pulvino,* Dan Sutton,t and J.J. Naddeo I Artificial intelligence is beginning to shape the criminal justice system, but scholars have largely overlooked its impact on prosecutors the system's most powerful actors. This gap is significant because large language models are particularly well-suited to legal work, where analysis and writing are central. Companies now market AI tools that prepare a first draft of potential charges and legal memos, promising to turn 1 day of work into 1 hour. With heavy caseloads and few guardrails, prosecutors may be quick to adopt them, and some offices already report using AI to draft charging documents and analyze evidence. We conducted a large-scale experiment examining how AI might influence prosecutorial decision-making. Using real police reports from common low-level offenses, we asked a widely used ChatGPT model to generate over 140,000 legal memos. While we anticipated signs of racial bias, we discovered a more foundational issue: the model exhibits aprosecutorial default bias. It systematically recommends prosecution-even when prompted from a defense perspective, confronted with minimal evidence, or presented with clear constitutional violations. These findings raise urgent questions about the integration of AI into legal workflows. We explore the role of automation bias the pattern, even among highly trained professionals, to defer to algorithmic suggestions and how it may anchor human decision-making toward harsher outcomes. We also examine how systems * Rory Pulvino is the Chief Implementation Officer at the Justice Innovation Lab. We are grateful to Lily Grier for technical help and to Jesse Rothman for helpful comments. t Dan Sutton is the Director of Justice and Safety, Stanford Center for Racial Justice at Stanford Law School. J.J. Naddeo is the Research Coordinator at the University of Michigan Law School. 2026 ] 1