Cyber Security Webinar by Prof.dr. Pieter Hartel : Investigating sentence severity with open data: A case study on sentencing in the Dutch criminal justice system

https://tudelft.zoom.us/j/95888405667?pwd=Rms0MGVhU2dXa1N0akhNN2o1QktEZz09 
Meeting ID: 958 8840 5667 
Passcode: 804725

 
Pieter Hartel, Rolf van Wegberg, Mark van Staalduinen

Open data promotes transparency and accountability as everyone can analyse it.
Law enforcement and the judiciary are also increasingly making data available,
partly to increase trust and confidence in the criminal justice system. 

Due to privacy legislation, judicial open data -- like court rulings -- in Europe is
usually anonymised. Because this removes part of the information on for
instance offenders, the question arises to what extent criminological research
into sentencing can make use of anonymised 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 www.rechtspraak.nl makes available.

 
Over the period 2015-2020, we analyzed sentencing in 21,307 court rulings and, in particular,
investigated the relationship between sentence severity and the offender's use
of advanced ICT -- as this is information that is readily available in open
data. The most important results are, firstly, that offenders who use advanced
ICT are sentenced to longer custodial sentences compared to other offenders.
Second, our results show that the quality of sentencing research with open data
is comparable to the quality of sentencing research on data built from case
files, which are not anonymised.