Investigating sentence severity with judicial open data: a case study on sentencing high-tech crime in the Dutch criminal justice system

Open data promotes transparency and accountability as everyone can analyse it. Law enforcement and the judiciary are increasingly making data available, to increase trust and confidence in the criminal justice system. Due to privacy legislation, judicial open data — like court judgements — in Europe...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Hartel, Pieter (Author) ; Wegberg, R.S. van (Author) ; van Staalduinen, Mark (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
Published: 2023
In: European journal on criminal policy and research
Year: 2023, Volume: 29, Issue: 4, Pages: 579-599
Online Access: Volltext (kostenfrei)
Rights Information:CC BY 4.0
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Keywords:
Coding software
Cybercrime
Focal Concerns
Open Data
Open source
Sentence severity
Description
Summary:Open data promotes transparency and accountability as everyone can analyse it. Law enforcement and the judiciary are increasingly making data available, to increase trust and confidence in the criminal justice system. Due to privacy legislation, judicial open data — like court judgements — in Europe is usually anonymized. And even if the court judgement has been made public, the rest of the case file is usually not published. Therefore, the question arises to what extent criminological research into sentencing can make use of anonymized open data. We answer this question based on a case study in which we use the open data of the Dutch criminal justice system that is available on https://www.rechtspraak.nl/Uitspraken. Over the period 2015-2020, we analysed sentencing in 25,366 court judgements and investigated the relationship between sentence severity and the offender’s use of advanced Information and Communication Technology (ICT). The most important results are, firstly, that offenders who use advanced ICT are sentenced to longer custodial sentences compared to other offenders. Secondly, sentencing research with open data is found to be feasible.
Item Description:Literaturverzeichnis: Seite 597-599
ISSN:1572-9869
DOI:10.1007/s10610-021-09503-5