Investigating sentence severity with judicial open data ; A case study on sentencing high-tech crime in the Dutch criminal justice system

Abstract Open data promotes transparency and accountability as everyone can analyse it. Law enforcement and the judiciary are increasingly making data available, to increase trust and confidence in the criminal justice system. Due to privacy legislation, judicial open data — like court judgements — in Europe is usually anonymized. And even if the court judgement has been made public, the rest of the case file is usually not published. Therefore, the question arises to what extent criminological research into sentencing can make use of anonymized open data. We answer this question based on a ca... Mehr ...