Federal Justice Statistics Program: Defendants in Federal Criminal Cases Filed in District Court, 2012 (ICPSR 35490)

Version Date: Feb 4, 2015

Cite this study |

Principal Investigator(s):
United States Department of Justice. Office of Justice Programs. Bureau of Justice Statistics

Series:

https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR35490.v1

Version V1

Slide tabs to view more

Summary

The data contain records of defendants in criminal cases filed in United States District Court during fiscal year 2012. The data were constructed from the Administrative Office of the United States District Courts' (AOUSC) criminal file. Defendants in criminal cases may be either individuals or corporations. There is one record for each defendant in each case filed. Included in the records are data from court proceedings and offense codes for up to five offenses charged at the time the case was filed. (The most serious charge at termination may differ from the most serious charge at case filing, due to plea bargaining or action of the judge or jury.) In a case with multiple charges against the defendant, a "most serious" offense charge is determined by a hierarchy of offenses based on statutory maximum penalties associated with the charges. The data file contains variables from the original AOUSC files as well as additional analysis variables, or "SAF" variables, that denote subsets of the data. These SAF variables are related to statistics reported in the Compendium of Federal Justice Statistics, Tables 4.1-4.5 and 5.1-5.6. Variables containing information (e.g., name, Social Security number) were replaced with blanks, and the day portions of date fields were also sanitized in order to protect the identities of individuals. These data are part of a series designed by the Urban Institute (Washington, DC) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Data and documentation were prepared by the Urban Institute.

Citation

United States Department of Justice. Office of Justice Programs. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Federal Justice Statistics Program: Defendants in Federal Criminal Cases Filed in District Court, 2012. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2015-02-04. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR35490.v1

Export Citation:

  • RIS (generic format for RefWorks, EndNote, etc.)
  • EndNote

Funding

United States Department of Justice. Office of Justice Programs. Bureau of Justice Statistics

Subject Terms

Geographic Coverage

Smallest Geographic Unit

United States

Restrictions

Access to these BJS-sponsored data is restricted. Users interested in obtaining these data must complete a NACJD Restricted Data Use Agreement available from the ResearchDataGov website, specify the reasons for the request, and obtain IRB approval or notice of exemption for their research.

Restricted Data Use Agreements available on the NACJD website are provided for reference only. Please visit the ResearchDataGov website to download the appropriate Restricted Data Use Agreement and submit your request. Once approved, data may be accessed from a requester secure site via ICPSR's secure download procedures.

Distributor(s)

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
Hide

Time Period(s)

2011-10-01 -- 2012-09-30 (Fiscal year 2012)

Date of Collection

2011-10-01 -- 2012-09-30 (Fiscal year 2012)
Hide

Time Method

Cross-sectional

Universe

Criminal cases filed in United States District Court during fiscal year 2012.

Unit(s) of Observation

defendants in federal criminal cases

Data Source

extracts from the AOUSC criminal file

Data Type(s)

Hide

Original Release Date

2015-02-04

Version History

2018-02-15 The citation of this study may have changed due to the new version control system that has been implemented. The previous citation was:
  • United States Department of Justice. Office of Justice Programs. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Federal Justice Statistics Program: Defendants in Federal Criminal Cases Filed in District Court, 2012. ICPSR35490-v1. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2015-02-04. http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR35490.v1

2015-02-04 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:

  • Created variable labels and/or value labels.
Hide

Notes

  • The public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public. Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.

  • One or more files in this data collection have special restrictions. Restricted data files are not available for direct download from the website; click on the Restricted Data button to learn more.