Eric Loomis was sentenced in Wisconsin after a circuit court considered his score on COMPAS, a commercial risk-assessment tool made by the company Northpointe (later Equivant) that predicts the likelihood a defendant will reoffend. Loomis argued the use of COMPAS violated his right to due process because the algorithm was a trade secret: neither he nor the court could inspect how it weighed inputs to produce his score, so he could not challenge its accuracy or test whether it was scientifically valid.
On July 13, 2016, the Supreme Court of Wisconsin decided State v. Loomis (2016 WI 68), affirming the sentence in an opinion by Justice Ann Walsh Bradley. The court held that a sentencing court’s use of a COMPAS risk assessment did not violate due process, as long as the score was not the determinative factor and the court used it together with other information. But the opinion attached significant cautions. It required that any presentence report using COMPAS include a written warning to judges about the tool’s limitations - including that the algorithm is proprietary and its inner workings are not disclosed, that some studies had raised questions about whether it disproportionately classified minority offenders as higher risk, and that COMPAS was built to compare defendants to a national sample rather than to a Wisconsin-specific population.
The case became a landmark in the debate over algorithmic decision-making in the justice system. It is frequently cited alongside the same year’s ProPublica investigation into COMPAS, which argued the tool produced racially skewed error rates. The US Supreme Court declined to hear Loomis’s appeal in 2017.
Why business readers should care: Loomis is a foundational example of courts confronting a tension that now appears across hiring, lending, and insurance: an organization relies on a vendor’s proprietary model whose logic no one outside the vendor can see, while the people affected demand an explanation. The court’s compromise - allow the tool but require disclosure of its limits - foreshadowed later transparency rules.