Official criminal court data: An examination of their reliability
Abstract:
This paper examines criminal court data collected by the Czech
courts and the Ministry of Justice, including information about proceedings,
decisions, offenses, offenders, and sanctions. First, the dataset’s
composition, historical development, advantages and disadvantages are
discussed to elucidate the purposes for which the data can be used. The next
part of the paper presents the verification results of this dataset.
A representative sample of 444 offenders was selected and the court
decisions for these cases were then requested and compared with the
criminal court data. For most of the variables, the criminal court dataset
matched the information in the court decision s. Systemic problems
(especially regarding prior convictions) were only detected in a small
number of variables. Finally, the study’s implications for the public,
researchers and the Czech Ministry of Justice are discussed.
Keywords:
crime statistics; cour t statistics; quantitative sentencing; data; reliability
Authors:
Tomáš Vanča, Jakub Drápal
DOI: