Evaluation of Pre-Trial Settlement Conference: Dade County, Florida, Criminal Court, 1979 (ICPSR 7710)

Principal Investigator(s): Kerstetter, Wayne A.

Summary: This study reports on the implementation in Dade County, Florida, of a proposal to involve, on a voluntary basis, victims, defendants, and police in a judicial plea negotiation conference. The study was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, United States Department of Justice. Parts 1-3, Defendants, Victims, and Police files, consist of responses to questionnaires given to defendants, vict... (more info)

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Kerstetter, Wayne A. EVALUATION OF PRE-TRIAL SETTLEMENT CONFERENCE: DADE COUNTY, FLORIDA, CRIMINAL COURT, 1979. ICPSR ed. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [producer and distributor], 1997. doi:10.3886/ICPSR07710.v1

Persistent URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR07710.v1

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This survey was funded by:

• United States Department of Justice. Office of Justice Programs. National Institute of Justice (76-NI-99-0088)

Summary:   This study reports on the implementation in Dade County, Florida, of a proposal to involve, on a voluntary basis, victims, defendants, and police in a judicial plea negotiation conference. The study was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, United States Department of Justice. Parts 1-3, Defendants, Victims, and Police files, consist of responses to questionnaires given to defendants, victims, and police. The questionnaires were administered during 20-minute interviews, conducted after the case had been completed. The interview instruments were designed to collect data on three major issues: (1) the extent to which respondents reported participation in the processing of their cases, (2) respondents' knowledge of the way their cases were processed, and (3) respondents' attitudes toward the disposition of their cases and toward the criminal justice system. Part 4 is the Conference Data File. During the pretrial settlement conference, an observer wrote down in sequence as much as possible of the verbal behavior. After the session, the observer made some subjective ratings, provided descriptive data about the conclusion of the session, and classified comments into one of the following categories: (1) Facts of the Case, (2) Prior Record, (3) Law and Practices, (4) Maximum Sentence, (5) Prediction of Trial Outcome, (6) Conference Precedent, (7) Personal Background History, and (8) Recommendations. Information in Part 5, the Case Information Data File, was drawn from court records and includes type of case, number of charges, sentence type, sentence severity (stated and perceived), seriousness of offense, date of arrest, date of arraignment, date of conference, prior incarcerations, and defendant background.

Subject Terms:   case processing, courts, disposition (legal), criminal justice system, defendants, plea negotiation, police officers, pretrial procedures, victims

Geographic Coverage:   Florida, United States

Time Period:  

• 1979

Data Types:   survey data and administration records data

Data Source:

personal interviews, self-enumerated questionnaires, court records, and conference observation

Extent of Processing:  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:

• Standardized missing values.
• Performed recodes and/or calculated derived variables.
• Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.

Original ICPSR Release:  1984-05-03

Version History:

• 2005-11-04 On 2005-03-14 new files were added to one or more datasets. These files included additional setup files as well as one or more of the following: SAS program, SAS transport, SPSS portable, and Stata system files. The metadata record was revised 2005-11-04 to reflect these additions.
• 1997-02-25 SAS and SPSS data definition statements are now available for this collection.

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