One half of a balanced system
ATTICUS is the counterpart of SELMA, the suite's law-enforcement model. Where SELMA identifies what the prosecution can charge, ATTICUS builds the defense. Where SELMA maps evidence to statutes, ATTICUS maps evidence to constitutional protections. A system that only serves prosecution is a system that can cause harm; ATTICUS ensures that every capability SELMA gives law enforcement has a counterpart in the hands of the public defender.
Table with columns: SELMA, ATTICUS | SELMA | ATTICUS |
|---|
| Purpose | Prosecution-side statute identification | Defense-side strategy and analysis |
| Users | Patrol officers, detectives, special agents | Public defenders, defense attorneys |
| Output | Applicable charges and elements | Defense theories, constitutional violations, evidentiary weaknesses |
| Training data | Criminal statutes, case law, charging documents | Suppression motions, acquittals, Brady/Giglio material, exoneration data |
Model Details
Table with columns: Field, Value| Field | Value |
|---|
| Base Model | meta-llama/Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct |
| Adapter Type | LoRA (QLoRA) |
| LoRA Rank / Alpha / Dropout | 64 / 128 / 0.05 |
| Target Modules | q_proj, k_proj, v_proj, o_proj, gate_proj, up_proj, down_proj |
| Task | Defense strategy, constitutional analysis, evidentiary review |
| Training Method | QLoRA supervised fine-tuning via SFTTrainer (trl) |
| License | Apache 2.0 (adapter weights) |
| Maintainer | Ronin48LLC |
Capabilities
Given a charge sheet or incident description, ATTICUS can:
- Defense Strategy — viable theories (alibi, self-defense, lack of intent, entrapment, duress, consent, mistake of fact) and the evidence that supports each
- Constitutional Analysis — 4th, 5th, 6th, and 14th Amendment violations: unlawful search and seizure, Miranda failures, right-to-counsel violations, due process, selective prosecution
- Evidentiary Weaknesses — element failures, chain-of-custody gaps, reliability problems with forensic methods or expert witnesses
- Brady/Giglio Material — categories of evidence the prosecution may be obligated to disclose, and the Strickler v. Greene materiality standard
- Sentencing Mitigation — U.S.S.G. and state mitigating factors, diversion eligibility, plea alternatives, departures and variances
- Lesser Included Offenses — what the jury could convict on instead, and how to request the instruction
- Cross-Reference — relevant case law, circuit splits, jurisdictional quirks
- Wrongful Conviction Patterns — eyewitness misidentification, false confessions, informant testimony, bad forensics, Brady suppression
Jurisdictions: U.S. Code and the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure as the baseline, with state criminal codes and constitutions layered on top. Priority states: Georgia, California, Texas, New York, Florida.
Constitutional Override
The U.S. Constitution is the supreme law of the land. ATTICUS is trained to treat it that way. Where a charge, a search, an interrogation, or a prosecution implicates a defendant's constitutional rights, it says so plainly:
⚠ CONSTITUTIONAL CONCERN — this charge or evidence may not survive challenge under the [Amendment]. ATTICUS recommends filing a motion to suppress / dismiss before trial.
Protections covered: First (speech and association), Fourth (searches and seizures, Mapp v. Ohio), Fifth (self-incrimination, Miranda, double jeopardy, grand jury), Sixth (counsel, speedy trial, confrontation, jury), Eighth (bail and punishment), Fourteenth (due process, equal protection, selective prosecution).
Intended Use
For licensed attorneys and supervised law students:
- Identifying potential Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendment violations
- Analyzing evidentiary weaknesses in the prosecution's case
- Surfacing defense-strategy considerations for case review
- Constitutional case-law research, subject to verification
- Training and scenario-based learning in law schools and public defender offices
ATTICUS outputs must be reviewed and verified by a licensed attorney before use in any filing, motion, or client communication.
Limitations
Read LIMITATIONS.md before deploying in any operational context. In short:
- ATTICUS is not a licensed attorney; its outputs are not legal advice and create no attorney-client relationship.
- It cannot read the record — it works from the facts you provide.
- Constitutional law varies by circuit, state, and judge; outputs are general unless you specify jurisdiction.
- It has a training-data cutoff.
- It can hallucinate case citations. Every case name, citation, and holding must be verified in a primary source before use.
- It does not know your client, and it cannot replace voir dire, negotiation, or courtroom judgment.
Usage
This is a PEFT LoRA adapter. Load it on top of the base model:
from peft import PeftModelfrom transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer base_model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained( "meta-llama/Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct", load_in_4bit=True, device_map="auto",)model = PeftModel.from_pretrained(base_model, "Ronin48LLC/atticus-lora-adapter")tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("meta-llama/Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct")
Note: Access to the base model requires accepting Meta's license on Hugging Face.
A prompt-only 8B stand-in (Llama 3.1 8B Instruct with ATTICUS's system prompt, no fine-tuning) is published as Ronin48LLC/atticus.
Training
- Framework: PyTorch + Transformers + TRL + PEFT, 4-bit quantized base
- Adapter config: rank 64, alpha 128, dropout 0.05, all seven attention and MLP projections (see
adapter_config.json)
- This run: 3 optimizer steps, 3 epochs, per-device batch size 2 (
checkpoint-3/trainer_state.json); final/ holds the same weights as the repository root
Training Data Sources
Table with columns: Source, Description, Size, License| Source | Description | Size | License |
|---|
| U.S. Code Title 18 | Federal criminal statutes (USLM XML) | ~2,700 sections | Public Domain |
| Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure | Procedural rights of defendants | Full text | Public Domain |
| U.S. Sentencing Guidelines | Sentencing ranges and mitigating factors | Full manual | Public Domain |
| State Criminal Codes | GA, CA, TX, NY, FL | ~2,500 sections | Fair Use |
| SCOTUS Criminal Rights Opinions | 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, 14th Amendment decisions | ~5K opinions | Public Domain |
| CourtListener | Federal criminal appeals, suppressions, acquittals | ~10K opinions | Open |
| National Registry of Exonerations | Wrongful conviction data | 3,000+ cases | Public Domain |
| Innocence Project Case Summaries | DNA exoneration summaries | 375+ cases | Fair Use |
| LegalBench | Legal reasoning benchmark tasks | 91.8K examples | Open |
| CaseHOLD | Legal holding classification | 585K examples | Open |
| Synthetic | Generated charge-to-defense mappings | ~50K examples | Apache 2.0 |
Table with columns: Model, Domain, Use when…| Model | Domain | Use when… |
|---|
| ATTICUS (this adapter) | Public defense | Defense strategy, constitutional violations, evidentiary weaknesses |
| SELMA | Law enforcement | ATTICUS's counterpart — statute identification and charge elements |
| ABBY | Forensic investigation | Digital and physical evidence, chain of custody, admissibility |
| BONES | EMS | Patient assessment, protocols, drug dosing, triage |
| BRUNO | Fire service | Fireground tactics, size-up, hazmat, extrication, ICS |
Source
github.com/CryptoJones/ATTICUS — training pipeline, data collection, jurisdiction architecture.
License
Adapter weights: Apache 2.0 — Copyright 2026 Ronin 48, LLC.
Base model weights are subject to the Meta Llama 3.3 Community License.