Metadata record for Charging and Sentencing Decisions Under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines: A Three District Study, 1998-2000

Charging and Sentencing Decisions Under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines: A Three District Study, 1998-2000 Spohn , Cassia Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research ICPSR 2012-09-12 31141 doi://10.3886/ICPSR31141.v1

The Charging and Sentencing Decisions Under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines: A Three District Study, 1998-2000 looks at federal sentencing practices and outcomes at the district level and uses quantitative and qualitative research techniques to describe and analyze charging, plea bargaining, and sentencing policies, practices, and outcomes. This research studies three United States District Courts: the District of Nebraska, the District of Minnesota, and the Southern District of Iowa. The primary objectives of this study are: (1) to test for inter-district disparity in sentencing; (2) to describe charging and plea bargaining practices and to identify the predictors of charging and plea bargaining decisions; and (3) to examine the effect of offender and case characteristics on sentence outcomes at the district level. Detailed data on the offender, the case, and the sentence was obtained from the USSC's Offender Datafile for each district for each year. Data was supplemented with information contained in the Presentence Investigation Report, the Sentencing Recommendation, the Order of Judgment, and other documents provided by each United States District Court. Judges, attorneys, and probation officers in each district were interviewed. This dataset includes basic demographic variables such as race, age, sex, marital status, and education level. Other data obtained includes substance use, offense type, criminal charges, physical and mental health treatment, and court and trial proceeding information.

UniverseScheme31141 Organization31141_1 SES-0136236 ICPSR.XVII.E court system criminal justice system district courts federal courts judges judicial decision making offender profiles offenders plea negotiations sentencing sentencing guidelines Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, United States 1998 2000 individual administrative records data Sentencing outcomes for all cases prosecuted during the 1998-2000 fiscal years in three District Courts: the District of Nebraska, the District of Minnesota, and the Southern District of Iowa. All cases prosecuted in the District Courts of Nebraska, Minnesota, and Southern Iowa during the 1998-2002 fiscal years. 2002 2004

ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.

ICPSR

This data collection may not be used for any purpose other than statistical reporting and analysis. Use of these data to learn the identity of any person or establishment is prohibited. To protect respondent privacy, this data collection is restricted from general dissemination. To obtain this file, researchers must agree to the terms and conditions of a Restricted Data Use Agreement in accordance with existing ICPSR servicing policies.

AVAILABLE. This study is freely available to the general public.

The original collector of the data, ICPSR, and the relevant funding agency bear no responsibility for use of the data or for interpretations or inferences based upon such uses.

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Rearch ICPSR

Ann Arbor MI

http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ netmail@icpsr.umich.edu National Science Foundation StudyUnit31141

The original data collection was produced by the University of Nebraska, Omaha, Nebraska.