Data for: Identity in Court Decision-Making

The data set "ANP_lay_judge_data" consists of compiled information from protocols pertaining to 15,456 criminal court hearings; all criminal court trials in Stockholms Tingsrätt (the Stockholm district court) in years 2000 to 2004. Information was collected from the Stockholm court archive by photocopying the trial and sentencing protocols, and compiled into a data set holding information about the defendant, judge, lay judges and the prosecutor, as well as criminal charges, sentencing outcomes and additional trial information. Note that all individual identifiers are pseudonymized. Access to the data set (in .dta or .csv format) is subject to application, this folder contains a detailed description of it and a variable list.

The data set was created for a research project on the effect of judge and other judicial decision-makers' background, in terms of demographics and socioeconomic conditions, on court sentencing outcomes. Its first research paper investigates whether similarities between the defendant and the jurors result in milder sentences, i.e. identity effects.