Our generation’s demands for transparency, due process, and accountability as artificial intelligence enters juvenile and criminal proceedings.
In February 2026, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York ruled that a criminal defendant’s conversations with a public AI tool were not protected by attorney-client privilege. It was the first decision of its kind in the country, and within days more than a dozen major law firms warned clients that anything typed into a chatbot about a case could be turned over to prosecutors.
The more someone leans on free AI because counsel is out of reach, the more their own words can be used against them.
The legal press covered this as a problem for corporate clients and their lawyers. Almost no one asked the question that matters most to us: what happens to the defendant who cannot afford a lawyer at all, and turns to a free chatbot because it is the only legal help within reach? That is a due process problem and an equality problem at once, and it falls heaviest on the young, the poor, and the over-policed.
Risk-assessment algorithms already shape bail and sentencing. Predictive systems already steer police toward certain neighborhoods and certain kids. AI-altered media is already entering courtrooms as evidence. We are the generation that will live longest under the systems being built right now. Here is what we ask leaders to commit to before an algorithm is allowed to shape a person’s liberty.
Risk-assessment tools like COMPAS already inform bail and sentencing, yet defendants are often never told a tool was used, and the companies that build them shield their workings as trade secrets. In State v. Loomis, the Wisconsin Supreme Court let a proprietary risk score factor into a sentence even though neither the defendant nor the court could examine how it worked. You cannot challenge what you cannot see.
A risk score is an accusation, and accusations are supposed to be answerable. But algorithmic outputs are often treated as neutral fact. The Heppner ruling sharpened the problem: a defendant without a lawyer who turns to free AI may find his own words used against him, while a corporate defendant with a white-shoe firm is counseled to avoid the trap entirely. Due process cannot mean one thing for those who can afford counsel and another for those who cannot.
Facial recognition has already produced a string of wrongful arrests of Black Americans, and the foundational research showing these systems fail most often on darker-skinned faces is now a decade old. When a tool causes that kind of harm, responsibility too often vanishes into the space between the agency that deployed it and the vendor that built it.
Children are not small adults, and the labels attached to them follow for life. Predictive and surveillance tools are already entering schools, and data gathered to educate a student can be quietly repurposed to police that same student — a new, automated on-ramp to the justice system built into the institutions young people are required by law to attend.
We are asking scholars, advocates, technologists, and young people who share these commitments to add their names. The technology will keep moving. These principles should not have to be re-argued every time it does.
Your name will appear in the signatories list as we confirm submissions.