  Legal Judgment Prediction is one of the most acclaimed fields for the
combined area of NLP, AI, and Law. By legal prediction we mean an intelligent
systems capable to predict specific judicial characteristics, such as judicial
outcome, a judicial class, predict an specific case. In this research, we have
used AI classifiers to predict judicial outcomes in the Brazilian legal system.
For this purpose, we developed a text crawler to extract data from the official
Brazilian electronic legal systems. These texts formed a dataset of
second-degree murder and active corruption cases. We applied different
classifiers, such as Support Vector Machines and Neural Networks, to predict
judicial outcomes by analyzing textual features from the dataset. Our research
showed that Regression Trees, Gated Recurring Units and Hierarchical Attention
Networks presented higher metrics for different subsets. As a final goal, we
explored the weights of one of the algorithms, the Hierarchical Attention
Networks, to find a sample of the most important words used to absolve or
convict defendants.
