Why Transparency
The case for open, structured court data
From the Founders to law-review scholarship and published research — why sentencing patterns must be visible, what the record shows, and what you can do about it.
I. The Constitutional Foundation
“the right to attend criminal trials is implicit in the guarantees of the First Amendment.”
Historical/legal statement. Does not constitute an endorsement of CaseParity.
The Court established that right forty-six years ago. The ruling was 7–1, crossing every ideological line on the 1980 bench. The right belongs not to defendants, not to lawyers — but to the public.
The case arose when a Virginia judge closed a courtroom during a murder retrial. The Supreme Court reversed: centuries of Anglo-American legal tradition, combined with the structural logic of the First Amendment, guarantee the public’s right to observe criminal proceedings. There is no justice without a witness.
From the courtroom to the record
Two years after Richmond Newspapers, the Court turned that principle into a working test. In Globe Newspaper Co. v. Superior Court, it explained that two features of the criminal justice system together justify a public right of access:
- “the criminal trial historically has been open to the press and general public” — the test of experience; and
- the right of access “plays a particularly significant role in the functioning of the judicial process and the government as a whole” — the test of logic.
Globe Newspaper Co. v. Superior Court, 457 U.S. 596 (1982) · Source ↗
Historical/legal statement. Does not constitute an endorsement of CaseParity.
Courts have carried that access right into the internet era of electronic court records. In Courthouse News Service v. Planet, the Ninth Circuit held that “a qualified First Amendment right of access extends to timely access to newly filed civil complaints” — and the Fourth Circuit reached the same result in Courthouse News Service v. Schaefer, recognizing the public’s interest in “reasonably contemporaneous access” to electronically filed records.
Courthouse News Service v. Planet, 947 F.3d 581 (9th Cir. 2020) · Source ↗ · Courthouse News Service v. Schaefer, 2 F.4th 318 (4th Cir. 2021) · Source ↗
Historical/legal statements. Do not constitute an endorsement of CaseParity.
CaseParity does not litigate for access. It organizes records that are already published — affirmatively, by statute, in Florida (the Criminal Justice Data Transparency Act, Fla. Stat. §§ 900.05 & 943.6871) and in the public domain in Cook County (the State’s Attorney’s open-data release).
That scholarship is substantial. The First Amendment scholar Stephen Wermiel describes Richmond Newspapers as “the first decision in which the Supreme Court deemed that the public had some First Amendment right to access government information.”
- Stephen Wermiel, Richmond Newspapers, Inc. v. Virginia, The First Amendment Encyclopedia (MTSU Free Speech Center) · firstamendment.mtsu.edu ↗
- Eugene Cerruti, “‘Dancing in the Courthouse’: The First Amendment Right of Access Opens a New Round,” 29 U. Rich. L. Rev. 237 (1995).
- Heidi Kitrosser, “Secrecy in the Immigration Courts and Beyond,” 39 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 95 (2004).
- Laura K. Donohue, “The Common Law and First Amendment Qualified Right of Public Access,” Georgetown Law Journal (2024) · law.georgetown.edu ↗
Trial by jury. The oldest fairness guarantee in the common law.
Magna Carta, 1215: “No free man shall be seized or imprisoned … except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.” The Sixth Amendment, 1791: the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district where the crime was committed. The Founders built community judgment into the determination of guilt — a structural check on arbitrary government power.
That guarantee applies to the determination of guilt. The sentence comes after. One judge. Wide discretion. In a system where that discretion produces outcomes that vary by months or years depending on the courthouse, the judge, and the county — the fairness guarantee the Founders built in was for guilt. What happens to fairness after the verdict is what the data shows.
II. The Problem Physical Presence Cannot Solve
We cannot all sit in courtrooms, all the time. There are more than 3,000 county-level court systems in the United States. Hundreds of courtrooms operate simultaneously, every day. Transparency through physical presence does not scale.
The result: sentencing decisions accumulate in the dark. Patterns visible across thousands of cases are invisible at the level of any single observer. Judicial variance — the gap between how different judges sentence the same crime — exists not because anyone hid it, but because no one had a way to see it at scale.
III. Founding Voices — On Justice & Knowledge
The principle that justice must be visible, observable, and accountable is not a modern invention. It is the premise on which American law was built.
“The judicial power of the United States shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.”
Historical/legal statement. Does not constitute an endorsement of CaseParity.
“The most sacred of the duties of a government is to do equal and impartial justice to all its citizens.”
Historical/legal statement. Does not constitute an endorsement of CaseParity.
“There can be no free government without elections; and if elections without information, the people are but creatures of accident and caprice.”
Historical/legal statement. Does not constitute an endorsement of CaseParity.
“Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”
Historical/legal statement. Does not constitute an endorsement of CaseParity.
IV. What the Data Shows
This is not a theory. The research is peer-reviewed, published in major journals, and covers hundreds of thousands of cases over multiple decades.
Federal Sentencing at Scale: What 540,000 Cases Show
Topaz, Ning, Ciocanel & Bushway · Nature Human Behaviour · 2023
Key finding: Sentencing outcomes varied substantially by district and by judge — same crime, different result — even after controlling for the crime and criminal history.
Analysis of 540,000+ federal criminal sentences (1992–2020). Some districts showed minimal variance; others showed substantial gaps between judges in the same courthouse. The judge assigned was an independent predictor of sentence length. Open access, CC BY 4.0.
DOI: 10.1038/s41562-023-01679-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01679-4
Demographic Differences in Sentencing: An Update to the 2012 Booker Report
U.S. Sentencing Commission · United States Sentencing Commission · 2017
Key finding: Black male offenders received sentences approximately 19.1% longer than similarly situated white male offenders.
Analysis of federal sentences 2012–2016. Controls for criminal history, offense severity, and district. This is the government's own measurement of its own system.
https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/demographic-differences-sentencing
Inter-Judge Sentencing Disparity After Booker
Yang, C.S. · Harvard Law Review / SSRN · 2015
Key finding: Defendants sentenced by different judges in the same court for the same offense receive sentences varying by an average of 3–8 months.
After the Supreme Court's 2005 Booker ruling made federal guidelines advisory, inter-judge disparity persisted at the same level. The variance is structural, not incidental.
DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.2650666 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2650666
Implicit Racial Bias Across the Law
Kang, Bennett, Carbado et al. · Harvard Law Review Forum · 2012
Key finding: Implicit bias measurably affects legal actors at every stage of the criminal process, including judicial sentencing.
Foundational article assigned at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Stanford Law Schools. 1,400+ academic citations. Argues that structural remedies — including data transparency — are among the most effective counterweights.
DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.1953954 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1953954
V. Voices from Inside the System
The same charge. The same record.
A different judge. A different courthouse. A different county.
Publicly available sentencing records show substantial variation across judges and jurisdictions, including within similar offense categories. The record documents the variation. What explains it is a separate question.
Drive thirty minutes. Cross a county line. The data is there. It has never been organized to show it — until now.
Bryan Stevenson — Defense Attorney, Founder, Equal Justice Initiative
Harvard J.D. / M.P.P., 1985. Founded EJI in 1989. Won landmark Supreme Court rulings prohibiting the death penalty and mandatory life sentences for juvenile offenders. Clinical Professor of Law at NYU. Author of Just Mercy (2014). Guiding principle: “The opposite of poverty is not wealth. The opposite of poverty is justice.”
“I'm compelled to talk about it because I think it's one of the gravest injustices in the history of America.”
Historical/legal statement. Does not constitute an endorsement of CaseParity.
What crime survivors say
Source: Crime Survivors Speak 2022 — Alliance for Safety and Justice · asj.allianceforsafetyandjustice.org
VI. An Informed Citizenry
The principle that democracy requires informed participation applies to national elections. It applies equally to local ones: to district attorneys, judges, and county prosecutors who set charging policy for hundreds of thousands of cases a year.
“Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.”
Historical/legal statement. Does not constitute an endorsement of CaseParity.
“A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance.”
Historical/legal statement. Does not constitute an endorsement of CaseParity.
“Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right and a desire to know.”
Historical/legal statement. Does not constitute an endorsement of CaseParity.
“Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.”
Historical/legal statement. Does not constitute an endorsement of CaseParity.
CaseParity is data.
Not advocacy. Not opinion. Not a position on any sentence, any case, or any judge.
The record is public. We make it visible. What you do with that information at the ballot box is democracy.
VII. The Availability Gap
Only a handful of states
make structured court data accessible — even on an anonymized basis.
The constitutional right to observe criminal proceedings was established in 1980. Forty-six years later, most states do not publish structured sentencing data in any accessible form. Researchers must file individual records requests. Attorneys must build their own databases by hand.
This is not because the data does not exist. Every court produces records. The gap is in how those records are organized, maintained, and made available to the public that owns them.
Where data is currently available
VIII. What CaseParity Is — And Is Not
CaseParity does not determine guilt. It does not predict sentences. It does not tell you what a judge will do.
It shows you what judges have done — across thousands of real cases, using the public record that already exists.
For attorneys: Historical sentencing patterns from public records — charge, jurisdiction, time period, and documented outcome ranges.
For the public: A structured, anonymized window into how the system operates — the transparency the First Amendment always guaranteed.
Sentencing data is anonymized at the source — by the originating jurisdiction, before it reaches CaseParity. No individual is identified. No person can be looked up by name. The product supports pattern analysis across cases, not person identification.
All academic citations link directly to the originating journal, government report, or academic working paper. All judicial and legislative quotes are historical statements of legal principle — none constitute an endorsement of CaseParity, its reports, or any product or service. Sentencing data published on this platform is anonymized; no individual is identified.