united-states criminal-law common-law legal-research sentencing
Similar website to TheLawPages in the USA?
<p>I use a website called TheLawPages to research various crimes, and sentences given to offenders. It is an invaluable tool, especially because it allows me to pick the type of court, offence type, and even the age of the defendant. The output would show defendants that have pleaded, or been found, guilty and their subsequent sentence. Unfortunately, this website is only for offences and sentences in the United Kingdom.</p>
<p>Are there any websites similar to <a href="https://www.thelawpages.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">TheLawPages</a> for American criminal Law? Preferably, I would like to search by state and perhaps even at the Federal level.</p>

<p>The U.S. has no such website, at least at either the federal or the state level. It is possible that some local courts allow their records to be searched on that basis although I am not aware of any that do so.</p>
<p>Probably the closest database to that in the U.S. accessible to the public is the non-governmental non-profit organization operated <a href="https://trac.syr.edu/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Transactional Record Access Clearinghouse</a> for federal criminal justice records (and other federal government records). It has lots of data on federal government matters from a variety of sources but isn't quite as comprehensive or as easy to use as the website described in the question. The problem with that is that the federal courts handle only a small percentage of the criminal cases in the United States, and it is a highly skewed mix of cases (e.g. with lots of immigration cases but few ordinary &quot;blue collar crime&quot; cases outside Indian Reservations and federal parks).</p>
<p>The information necessary to build such a website is largely a matter of public record, but no one has taken on the task of making such a website.</p>
<p>In part, this is because the task is so daunting. While the federal courts have a comprehensive electronic database called PACER, each state has at least one separate court case data base system, and many states have trial court case databases only at the county level and not at the state level, or have different databases for different kinds of courts. Even in states that do have statewide databases, there are often some courts that aren't included. For example, Colorado's state courts are part of a single statewide database, but its municipal courts each have their own separate court by court databases. Some rural areas in the U.S. still keep trial court records in paper form only.</p>
<p>The data has been gathered from time to time of important subsets of this kind of data, but it isn't publicly available.</p>
<p>For example, a media consortia in Florida gathered information to examine the consistency of sentencing and the extent of racial discrimination in sentencing in Florida, and the U.S. Sentencing Commission in the United States gathers such information selectively to make sentencing decisions. Neither of those compilations, however, including making the raw data available to the public.</p>
<p>Similarly, there is a separate private academic database that tracks case level state general jurisdiction trial court data in 75 of the largest urban counties in the United States (including state law felony cases). But, that database is only available to members of the academic consortium that maintains it (basically, professors at affiliated universities and other professors granted privileges to use it from consortium member professors).</p>
<p>The Westlaw division of its parent company, and Lexis-Nexus collect some trial court level data on U.S. courts, state and federal, on a non-comprehensive, basically opportunistic basis, but don't have complete data from any jurisdiction (although Westlaw's federal data basis has a pretty significant share of reasoned federal trial court orders). Both of these services require paid subscriptions.</p>
<p>In contrast, comprehensive databases of precedent making appellate court decisions at the state and federal level are widely available on both a commercial basis (with better search tools, headnote analysis, and correlations of the data like records of cases citing other cases and statutes), and on a non-commercial basis (with just the bare bones text of the cases). This is because this information is necessary to almost every lawyer and judge to practice law on a day to day basis.</p>
