No. 02 · The Practice · APR 28, 2026
“You can't cross-examine a risk score.”
A morning with Marisol Vega, a public defender in Cook County, on how algorithmic pretrial assessment shows up in her practice. — As told to the editor.
Marisol Vega arrives at bond court most weekdays before seven. By the time the judge takes the bench she has read perhaps forty files, met two or three of the people whose files they are, and formed a working theory of what to ask for in each case. The risk score is in every file. She rarely mentions it out loud.
We spoke between her morning call and her afternoon arraignments, in a coffee shop two blocks from the courthouse, with the volume on her phone turned up in case the judge moved faster than expected.
When did the risk score first start appearing in your files?
It was always there in some form. The version we have now arrived, with some fanfare, about six years ago. We were told it would make bond decisions more consistent. In a narrow sense, it has. The judges now disagree about a smaller set of things.
What do you do with the score, as a defender?
I read it. I read the inputs to it, when I can get them, which is not always. And then mostly I try to tell the judge a story about my client that the score cannot tell, because the score was not designed to tell stories. It was designed to produce a number.
The problem is that the number is in the file before the story is. So I am always working uphill.
Can you challenge the score itself?
Not really. You can challenge an input — argue that a prior was misclassified, that an address is wrong, that a missed court date had a reason. But the model itself is not something you can put on the stand. You cannot ask it what it weighted and why. You cannot cross-examine a risk score. That is the phrase I use with new defenders. It sounds glib. It is the most honest thing I know how to say about the situation.
Marisol Vega has been a public defender in Cook County for eleven years. She represents adults charged with felonies at the bond hearing stage. This conversation took place in April 2026 over coffee near the courthouse. It has been edited for length and clarity, and the interviewee reviewed the final version.
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