Research
The case for transparency is not new.
For four decades, courts, Congress, the bench, the bar, and crime survivors have all described the same thing: outcomes for like cases vary, and the public record that would let anyone see it has rarely been organized. This page gathers what the sources say. It draws no conclusions of its own.
Congress named it first
Variation in sentencing is not a new observation. The legislature named it in statute.
When Congress passed the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, it identified the problem in plain terms. The Senate report accompanying the Act described “the wide variation in sentences imposed by different judges upon similarly situated offenders” as a principal source of unwarranted disparity — and made reducing that variation an explicit purpose of the reform.
The point here is descriptive, not argumentative: the existence of measurable variation across decision-makers has been part of the public record of federal sentencing policy for more than forty years. CaseParity organizes the documented outcomes; it does not characterize whether any particular variation is warranted.
Source: Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 · S. Rep. No. 98-225 (1983), accompanying the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984.
Historical/legal statement cited for context; not an endorsement of CaseParity or any product or service.
Voices from the bench and bar
People inside the system have described it in their own words.
U.S. Sentencing Commission · 2019
“In most cities studied, the length of a defendant's sentence increasingly depended on which judge in the courthouse was assigned to the case.”
Finding of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, Intra-City Differences in Federal Sentencing Practices (2019) — a study of federal sentencing across 30 major cities, which observed increasing inter-judge variation in 25 of the 30.
Government data finding cited for context; not an endorsement of CaseParity or any product or service. Source ↗
Judge Mark W. Bennett
“I'm compelled to talk about it because I think it's one of the gravest injustices in the history of America.”
Judge Mark W. Bennett, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa, referring to mandatory minimum sentencing for nonviolent drug offenders (2017).
Historical/legal statement cited for context; not an endorsement of CaseParity or any product or service.
Sources: U.S. Sentencing Commission, Intra-City Differences in Federal Sentencing Practices (2019), ussc.gov. Bennett — CNN (June 2, 2017) and NPR (June 1, 2017).
A practitioner’s account
Bryan Stevenson on fairness and the shape of outcomes.
Bryan Stevenson (born 1959, Milton, Delaware) is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, which he founded in 1989, and a clinical professor of law at NYU School of Law. He holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and an M.P.P. from the Harvard Kennedy School (both 1985), and is the author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014). He argued and won the landmark Supreme Court cases Graham v. Florida (2010) and Miller v. Alabama (2012), and is a MacArthur Fellow.
Stevenson’s decades of work have centered on a recurring theme: that outcomes in the criminal system are shaped by factors beyond the facts of an offense, and that fairness depends on being able to see and compare how like cases are actually resolved. CaseParity organizes that comparison from the public record. It takes no position on any individual case, and it asserts no cause for the variation it documents.
Source (biography): Equal Justice Initiative, https://eji.org/bryan-stevenson/
What crime survivors say
A national survey of crime survivors found preferences that are often assumed but rarely measured.
Rehabilitation over punishment
2 : 1
Investment in mental health
6 : 1
Crime survivors preferred that the justice system focus on rehabilitation over punishment, by a two-to-one margin.
Survivors preferred increased investment in mental-health treatment over prisons and jails, by a six-to-one margin.
Source: Crime Survivors Speak — 2022 National Survey, Alliance for Safety and Justice (Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice). asj.allianceforsafetyandjustice.org
Survey findings cited for context; not an endorsement of CaseParity or any product or service.
Constitutional foundation
Why publishing the record is protected in the first place.
“The openness of criminal courtrooms is implicit in the guarantees of the First Amendment.”
Source: U.S. Supreme Court. Full text at Justia: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/448/555/ · Historical/legal statement cited for context; not an endorsement of CaseParity or any product or service.
The right of access to criminal proceedings is a public right. CaseParity treats the organization and publication of anonymized outcome data as an exercise of that same transparency function — making visible, in aggregate, what is in principle open to anyone who could sit in every courtroom at once.
What the data does — and doesn’t — establish