Why Judges should be allowed to have snacks and regular breaks - Extraneous Factors affecting Judicial decisions

After being shouted at by numerous judges during my first year of practice i would like to propose changes in practice and paradigm that may improve the quality of Justice and fairness.

Simply put, allowing Judges to snack on the bench during long court days will likely improve their mood and result in a more fair and equitable judicial system.

Having more breaks during long court sessions whenever final decisions are being made may also help.

Because a hungry judge is an angry judge.

Other extraneous factors also influence a judge's decision making ability and every effort should be made to mitigate these factors.

Please see this paper as proof of this assertion:-

http://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889.full

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We test the common caricature of realism that justice is “what the judge ate for breakfast” in sequential parole decisions made by experienced judges.

We record the judges’ two daily food breaks, which result in segmenting the deliberations of the day into three distinct “decision sessions.” We find that the percentage of favorable rulings drops gradually from ≈65% to nearly zero within each decision session and returns abruptly to ≈65% after a break. Our findings suggest that judicial rulings can be swayed by extraneous variables that should have no bearing on legal decisions.

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From an Economist article commenting on this

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http://www.economist.com/node/18557594

The researchers offer two hypotheses for this rise in grumpiness. One is that blood-sugar level is the crucial variable. This, though, predicts that the precise amount of time since the judge last ate will be what matters. In fact, it is the number of cases he has heard since his last break, not the number of hours he has been sitting, which best matches the data. That is consistent with a second theory, familiar from other studies, that decision making is mentally taxing and that, if forced to keep deciding things, people get tired and start looking for easy answers. In this case, the easy answer is to maintain the status quo by denying the prisoner's request."

These extraneous factors that affect judicial decisions clearly prejudice persons unfairly. The fact that my client's case has a lower chance of success if it is heard later on in the day when the judge is tired is highly unfair.

In fact the right to equality before the law and equal protection of the law ( section 4 (b) of the constitution ) can be said to be infringed to some extent. ADDENDUM  in reply to Mr. Mukta Balroops submissions on Facebook:

I believe this study shows Judge's are good at disabusing themselves of conscious bias

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"The severity of the prisoner's crime and prison time served tended not to exert an effect on rulings, nor did sex and ethnicity. The lack of a significant effect of prisoner ethnicity indicates that the Jewish-Israeli judges in our sample treated prisoners equally regardless of ethnicity."

The problem is unconscious bias due to low blood sugar and stress,ie. How can a human mind escape an inherent problem that affects brain function itself?

All i'm advocating for is fruit and snacks to be served to judges upon request during trials, and a different paradigm to go with that.