JUSTFAIR: Judicial System Transparency through Federal Archive Inferred Records

Abstract

In the Unites States, the public has a constitutional right to access criminal trial proceedings. In practice, it can be difficult or impossible for the public to exercise this right. We present JUSTFAIR: Judicial System Transparency through Federal Archive Inferred Records, a database of criminal sentencing decisions made in federal district courts. We have compiled this data set from public sources including the United States Sentencing Commission, the Federal Judicial Center, the Public Access to Court Electronic Records system, and Wikipedia. With nearly 600,000 records from the years 2001 - 2018, JUSTFAIR is the first large scale, free, public database that links information about defendants and their demographic characteristics with information about their federal crimes, their sentences, and, crucially, the identity of the sentencing judge.

JUSTFAIR: Judicial System Transparency through Federal Archive Inferred Records

“…Perhaps ironically, our two primary data sources, the United States Sentencing Commission and the Federal Judicial Center, are physically co-located in the Thurgood Marshall Federal Judiciary Building in Washington, D.C. Before JUSTFAIR, the information necessary to identify sentencing judges lived behind a paywall and was therefore inaccessible to many people. We have made the JUSTFAIR data set public [31] and we have created an interactive online visualizer for exploration of the data [32]. By doing so, we hope to correct the inequity of access to information about sentencing judges.…”

Racial Disparities in Criminal Sentencing Vary Considerably across Federal Judges

“…Source We analyze the JUSTFAIR (Judicial System Transparency through Federal Archive Inferred Records) database of criminal sentencing decisions in federal courts (Ciocanel et al, 2020). JUSTFAIR is compiled from five public sources, includes almost 600,000 records from fiscal years 2001-2018, and links information about Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity, Inc., 501(c)3 http://www.qsideinstitute.org This report is available freely and without restriction at http://www.SocArXiv.org.…”

“…defendants, their federal crimes, their sentences, and the sentencing judges. Here we briefly summarize the JUSTFAIR data pipeline presented by Ciocanel et al (2020). Ciocanel and colleagues obtained information about criminal cases, defendants, and sentences from the U.S.…”

“…We have extended the JUSTFAIR data pipeline to include the available 2018-2019 fiscal year federal sentencing data, which is updated yearly in the USSC datafile for individual offenders and quarterly in the FJC Integrated Database. Our merging of offender, sentence, and judge information proceeded largely as described above and by Ciocanel et al (2020). Several USSC variables denoting the total prison sentence, the coding of the offense type, and the post-Booker reporting categories changed in the USSC database, therefore we adjusted the data processing approach of Ciocanel et al (2020) to remain consistent with the variables in JUSTFAIR.…”

“…Our merging of offender, sentence, and judge information proceeded largely as described above and by Ciocanel et al (2020). Several USSC variables denoting the total prison sentence, the coding of the offense type, and the post-Booker reporting categories changed in the USSC database, therefore we adjusted the data processing approach of Ciocanel et al (2020) to remain consistent with the variables in JUSTFAIR. This extended the dataset we analyze in this study by over 30,000 cases.…”