It might be the philosophical bedrock of the entire show: Do computers have, for lack of a better word, a soul? The ethical consensus is a repeated "yes." We see digital copies of people, or "cookies," experience a full range of emotions, and the show gleefully gaslights us into thinking they're regular people so often that it's almost become a trope.
Legally, however, cookies are seen as nothing more than computer programs. During "White Christmas," especially, we see that they're tortured and discarded on the daily. One character even says the ones who get pushed so far that they snap wind up being plugged into video games as cannon fodder. The message is clear: Cookies don't have human rights because legally speaking, they're not people.
But if they're not people, how could their confessions stand up in a court of law? At the end of "White Christmas," we learn that (twist!) Joe was actually a cookie the whole time, and that Jon Hamm's character has been interrogating him, trying to extract a confession. It just seems like any criminal charge that hinged on the statements of, from a legal perspective, an Amazon Echo, would be on some shaky ground.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7qL7Up56eZpOkunB9km1pamhfmcKuroytn6Kml6h6qrqMm6Oam5tiuqq%2B0aipZqyYlsFusdWeqbKnnpp6q8HSrWSin56kv6awjg%3D%3D