Federal Justice Statistics Program: Defendants in Federal Criminal Cases Filed in District Court, 2011

The data contain records of defendants in criminal cases filed in United States District Court during fiscal year 2011. The data were constructed from the Administrative Office of the United States District Courts' (AOUSC) criminal file. Defendants in criminal cases may be either individuals or corporations. There is one record for each defendant in each case filed. Included in the records are data from court proceedings and offense codes for up to five offenses charged at the time the case was filed. (The most serious charge at termination may differ from the most serious charge at case filing, due to plea bargaining or action of the judge or jury.) In a case with multiple charges against the defendant, a "most serious" offense charge is determined by a hierarchy of offenses based on statutory maximum penalties associated with the charges. The data file contains variables from the original AOUSC files as well as additional analysis variables, or "SAF" variables, that denote subsets of the data. These SAF variables are related to statistics reported in the Compendium of Federal Justice Statistics, Tables 4.1-4.5 and 5.1-5.6. Variables containing information (e.g., name, Social Security number) were replaced with blanks, and the day portions of date fields were also sanitized in order to protect the identities of individuals. These data are part of a series designed by the Urban Institute (Washington, DC) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Data and documentation were prepared by the Urban Institute.

本数据集收录2011财年美国联邦地区法院受理的刑事案件被告人记录，数据源自美国联邦地区法院行政办公室（Administrative Office of the United States District Courts, AOUSC）的刑事案卷档案。刑事案件被告人既可以是自然人，也可以是法人团体，每一起受理案件中的每位被告人均对应一条独立记录。每条记录包含案件受理时的法庭程序数据，以及最多五项指控的犯罪代码。（由于辩诉交易、法官裁决或陪审团决议，案件审结时的最严重指控可能与初始受理指控存在差异。）若被告人面临多项指控，将依据各指控对应的法定最高刑设置罪名层级，以此判定“最严重”指控罪名。本数据集文件既包含原始AOUSC档案中的变量，也包含用于标记数据集子集的额外分析变量——即“SAF变量”（SAF），此类变量与《联邦司法统计汇编》（Compendium of Federal Justice Statistics）中表4.1至4.5、表5.1至5.6刊载的统计数据相关。为保护个人身份信息，所有包含姓名、社会安全号码等个人信息的变量均已置空，日期字段中的日份信息也已做脱敏处理。本数据集是城市研究所（美国华盛顿哥伦比亚特区）与美国司法统计局联合开发的系列数据集之一，数据集及配套文档均由城市研究所编制完成。