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.
Section I
The Constitutional Foundation
In Richmond Newspapers, Inc. v. Virginia, 448 U.S. 555 (1980), the Supreme Court recognized the public’s First Amendment right to attend criminal trials.
Historical/legal statement. Does not constitute an endorsement of CaseParity.
The Court established that right in 1980. 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, holding that 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), in the public domain in Cook County (the State’s Attorney’s open-data release), and through official government data releases in Virginia (Virginia Criminal Sentencing Commission) and Texas (Harris County District Clerk records).
No witness can be present in every courtroom across the nation — there are thousands of them, in session every day. The right Chief Justice Burger described — in Richmond Newspapers, Inc. v. Virginia, the Supreme Court recognized the public’s First Amendment right to attend criminal trials — cannot be exercised in person at that scale. Structured, accessible court data is how that right of access is guaranteed in practice. It lets the public observe what no single witness ever could.
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.
Section 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.
Section III
Founding Voices — On Justice, Knowledge & an Informed Citizenry
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 — and it carries directly into the idea that self-government depends on a public able to see how the system works, from national elections down to the local prosecutors and judges who shape hundreds of thousands of cases a year.
“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.
“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.
“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.
“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.
Section IV
What the Data Shows
This is not a theory. The research is published in academic journals, law reviews, and official government reports, and covers hundreds of thousands of cases over multiple decades.
Federal Sentencing at Scale: What Over 500,000 Cases Show
Topaz, Ning, Ciocanel & Bushway · Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, vol. 10, art. 366 · 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 over 500,000 federal sentencing records from the USSC database (2006–2020). 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: 10.1057/s41599-023-01879-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-023-01879-5
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/2017-demographic-differences-federal-sentencing
What stays in the dark can’t be measured. The U.S. Sentencing Commission’s own 2017 analysis found Black male offenders received sentences about 19.1% longer than similarly situated white male offenders — a gap that is invisible until the record is made transparent.
Have Inter-Judge Sentencing Disparities Increased in an Advisory Guidelines Regime? Evidence from Booker
Yang, C.S. · 89 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1268 · 2014
Key finding: Inter-judge sentencing disparities roughly doubled after the Supreme Court's 2005 Booker ruling made the federal guidelines advisory.
After Booker, the gap between how different judges sentence the same offense grew. The variance is structural, not incidental.
Implicit Bias in the Courtroom
Kang, Bennett, Carbado et al. · 59 UCLA L. Rev. 1124 · 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.
Section 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.
Thirty minutes apart, across a county line. The record can look completely different — and it has never been organized to show it, until now.
The same observation runs through the scholarship of judges and legal academics. In Implicit Bias in the Courtroom, 59 UCLA L. Rev. 1124 (2012), a sitting federal judge and a group of legal scholars — including Judge Mark W. Bennett of the Northern District of Iowa — documented how bias can affect legal actors at every stage of the criminal process, and argued that structural remedies, including data transparency, are among the most effective counterweights.
What crime survivors say
From an advocacy-organization survey — not a government dataset — reported as the survey’s own findings:
Source: Crime Survivors Speak 2022 — Alliance for Safety and Justice, an advocacy organization · asj.allianceforsafetyandjustice.org
No individual named on this page has endorsed or is affiliated with CaseParity.
The principle that democracy requires informed participation applies to national elections. It applies equally to local ones: to the district attorneys, judges, and county prosecutors who set charging policy for hundreds of thousands of cases a year.
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.
Section VI
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. More than four decades 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
Section VII
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.
CaseParity · why we publish it
The right to attend criminal trials is implicit in the guarantees of the First Amendment.
Source: Richmond Newspapers, Inc. v. Virginia, 448 U.S. 555 (1980) · cited for context, not an endorsement
Shared posts carry their source and a note that CaseParity publishes public records — not legal advice.
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.