State Court Processing Statistics, 2002: Felony and Domestic Violence Defendants in Large Urban Counties (ICPSR 34892)

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The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) 2002 State Court Processing Statistics (SCPS) program provided the case processing data on 15,358 felony defendants charged in state court during the month of May in 2002 in 40 large counties in 18 states. The "State Court Processing Statistics Records" file includes information on their demographic characteristics, arrest charges, types of pretrial release or detention, adjudication outcomes, and types of sentences imposed.

The 15,358 defendants were selected through a systematic sample designed to represent the 36,974 defendants who had a felony case filed with these courts in May 2002. If a defendant was charged more than once during May 2002, he or she could appear in the sample multiple times. Each county was assigned to one of four stratum based on volume of court filings. Based on the stratum assigned to the county, the SCPS data on felony filings were collected for 5, 10, or 20 business days in May 2002. Data from counties that did not provide a full month of filings were weighted to represent the full month.

This study includes cases from 40 counties in 18 states: Alabama (Jefferson); Arizona (Maricopa, Pima); California (Alameda, Contra Costa, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Mateo, Santa Clara); Florida (Broward, Dade, Palm Beach, Pinellas); Georgia (Fulton); Hawaii (Honolulu); Illinois (Cook); Indiana (Marion); Maryland (Baltimore, Montgomery); Michigan (Macomb, Wayne); New Jersey (Essex); New York (Bronx, Kings, Nassau, Westchester); Ohio (Franklin); Pennsylvania (Montgomery, Philadelphia); Tennessee (Shelby); Texas (Dallas, El Paso, Harris, Tarrant, Travis); Utah (Salt Lake City); Virginia (Fairfax).

The data collected from the 2002 SCPS program were used as a starting point for a separate BJS study entitled Processing of Domestic Violence Cases in State Courts. State prosecutors and courts in 40 SCPS sites were asked to participate in a study examining how domestic violence (DV) cases are handled by the justice system. These counties were identified because they had participated in the 2002 SCPS data collection, which collected case processing information on a sample of felony cases filed in state courts. Of the counties asked to participate in the study on domestic violence case processing, prosecutors and courts in 16 counties agreed.

State prosecutors and courts in the participating counties provided data on 5,211 felony and misdemeanor domestic violence cases processed in the month of May in the 16 counties, including 4,562 defendants whose most serious arrest charge was a domestic violence offense. Domestic violence includes violence between family members, intimate partners, and household cohabitants. Approximately 3,750 of the cases involved a victim and defendant who were intimate partners.

Prosecutor files were the primary source of information on characteristics of the violent incident, including victim and defendant demographics, measures of the severity of the incident, such as weapon use by the defendant and whether the victim was injured, history of abuse between the victim and defendant, and the presence of witnesses to the incident. Court records were the primary source of information on case processing data, such as charges filed against the defendant, adjudication outcomes, and sentencing information. Case processing data were documented for one year following the defendant's first appearance in court in May 2002. The incident-based and case processing data collected on the 5,211 domestic violence defendants is available in the "Domestic Violence Case Processing Records" file.

The findings and additional details about the methodology from this study are available in two BJS reports - State Court Processing of Domestic Violence Cases (NCJ 214993) and Profile of Intimate Partner Violence Cases in Large Urban Counties (NCJ 228193). Findings in this study may not be representative of those that would have been obtained by examining cases processed throughout the entire year, or from other counties that did not participate in the study.

Criminal history data were collected to examine the pre- and post-adjudication patterns of persons arrested and charged with felony or domestic violence offenses in state courts in the study's 18 states. Records received from these states provided information on the "in-state" contacts (arrests and adjudications) the sampled defendant had with the justice system within the state where he or she was charged in May 2002 (both prior to and after being charged).

The unique content and structure of each state file was converted into a single relational database with a common coding structure that supports multi-state research. For example, all state-specific charge information (state statutes and free-text fields) were recoded into a uniform set of offense and charge severity codes, a process that enabled the data to be combine across states. Court disposition fields (which were often long text strings) were converted into numeric codes to document the adjudication outcomes. The database provides standardized information on the arrests, court dispositions, and sentences during the entire criminal careers of the sampled defendants both prior to and for 30 months following their initial court filing in May 2002.

This study includes an arrest file (named "State Criminal History - Arrest Records") and a court file (named "State Criminal History - Court Records") that provides the in-state criminal history information on the defendants in the "State Court Processing Statistics Records" and "Domestic Violence Case Processing Records" files (ST_CH=1). Each row in the arrest file provides information on an individual arrest charge. Each charge is stacked on top of one another and arranged from the earliest arrest date to the latest. The court file provides information on each court disposition associated with a charge in the arrest file. The PRIOR_ARR variable provides a cycle number for each arrest that occurred prior to or on the defendant's arrest date for the case filed in May of 2002. The NEW_ARR variable provides a cycle number for each arrest that occurred following the defendant's arrest date for the case filed in May of 2002. The cycle numbers in the PRIOR_ARR and NEW_ARR variables are based on the chronological order of the arrest dates from earliest to latest. The PRIOR_ARR and NEW_ARR variables allow one to link individual arrest events to the associated court dispositions across the files. The LINK_ST variable provides the unique case number assigned to each sampled defendant that links his or her incident-based and case processing information to his or her state criminal history data.

The incident-based, case processing, and criminal history data were collected and processed for BJS by the Regional Justice Information Services (REJIS) and the Pretrial Justice Institute.

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Felony and domestic violence court cases filed during the month of May in 2002 in the 40 large counties in the United States.

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2013-12-11

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