# Plain Language Summary: Justice in Forensic Algorithms Act of 2021

This bill addresses a growing problem in criminal justice: computer programs and artificial intelligence tools that police and prosecutors use to analyze evidence—like fingerprints, facial recognition, or DNA—often work like "black boxes" that nobody can fully understand or challenge. The bill says that when these tools are used to help convict someone, the defendant has the right to see how the software actually works, test it themselves, and prove it might be wrong. Right now, companies that make these tools often hide their methods behind "trade secrets," claiming it's proprietary information they can't share. This bill eliminates that excuse in criminal cases, saying that a defendant's right to a fair trial is more important than a company's business secrets.

The bill creates two main things to fix this problem. First, it establishes testing standards through the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)—basically a government agency that will create rules for how these forensic tools must be tested before they're used in court. These tests must check whether the software works differently for people of different races, ethnicities, or genders, since some AI tools have been found to have serious bias problems. The standards also require companies to publicly explain how they built their software and what data they used. Second, the bill creates an actual testing program where NIST will run these forensic tools through rigorous tests using realistic evidence samples and diverse test data, then publish the results online so everyone can see how well (or poorly) they perform.

For people accused of crimes, this bill is significant because it gives them real power to challenge computer-generated evidence. When prosecutors use forensic software against a defendant, that defendant now gets access to the actual software code, instructions on how to use it, and all the test data—so their own experts can examine it and potentially prove it's unreliable. The bill also says that evidence from these tools can only be used in court if the software has been tested by NIST and hasn't been secretly changed since that testing. Additionally, federal law enforcement agencies must use only software that's been through NIST testing and must share their own validation results publicly. The bill essentially says: if the government wants to use computer analysis to help put someone in prison, that tool has to be transparent, tested fairly, and open to challenge.

Justice in Forensic Algorithms Act of 2021

Takano, Mark

Justice in Forensic Algorithms Act of 2021 This bill establishes a federal framework to govern the use of computational forensic software. The term computational forensic software means software that relies on an automated computational process to assess evidence in a criminal investigation (e.g., facial recognition technology). The framework contains various elements, including the following: <ul> <li>requirements for the establishment of testing standards and a testing program for computational forensic software, </li> <li>requirements for the use of computational forensic software by federal law enforcement agencies and related entities (e.g., crime labs), </li> <li>a ban on the use of trade secret evidentiary privilege to prevent federal criminal defendants from accessing evidence collected using computational forensic software or information about the software (e.g., source code), and </li> <li>limits on the admissibility of evidence collected using computational forensic software.</li> </ul>