TL;DR
Researchers will stage two fictional criminal trials built around AI-generated evidence, to see how jurors, barristers and judges handle it. The first runs in Glasgow on 11 and 12 November with Lord Carloway, a former Lord Justice Clerk of Scotland, on the bench. A second follows in Newcastle upon Tyne on 16 and 17 March. Northumbria University announced the trials on 9 November.
How the trials work
The case is invented but built to feel real. Actors play the defendant and witnesses, while two real professionals give evidence: a police officer and an expert witness on biometric systems. The evidence includes facial recognition matches and outputs from large language models. In Glasgow, 15 members of the public, found through a research recruitment agency, will deliberate together as the jury. Advocate depute Alan Parfrey prosecutes and Tony Lenehan KC defends.
The researchers asked counsel to treat the case papers as they would in practice, so that arguments and cross-examination follow a realistic course. A pilot has already run in Northumbria’s moot court, with law students in every role.
What the researchers want to learn
Professor Marion Oswald, who leads the project, framed the central questions: will jurors misread the probabilistic nature of AI evidence, lean on it at the expense of other evidence, or disregard it, and do lawyers understand it well enough? Dr Angela Paul, a research fellow on the team, pointed to the risk of errors compounding as AI outputs pass between stages of an investigation, a “chaining” effect she says needs to be flagged. The team will also record how the legal professionals prepared before the trial.
The work sits within PROBabLE Futures, a four-year, £3.4m project funded by Responsible AI UK and led by Northumbria with five partner universities: Glasgow, Newcastle, Northampton, Leicester and Cambridge.
What it means
The trials arrive as AI moves closer to the courtroom through several routes at once. The Home Office plans to legislate on police facial recognition, and a senior judge has told expert witnesses to declare their AI use ahead of formal rules. In our view, juries are the gap in that picture: regulation can govern how the police use a tool, but only evidence like this can show how a panel of lay people weighs a probabilistic match once a barrister puts it in front of them. Because the project covers both Scotland and England and Wales, its findings could inform guidance in both systems.