Federal Justice Statistics Program: Defendants in Federal Criminal Cases Filed in District Court, 2014

The data contain records of defendants in criminal cases filed in United States District Court during fiscal year 2014. 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 Abt and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Data and documentation were prepared by Abt.

本数据集收录了2014财年美国联邦地区法院（United States District Court）受理的刑事案件中被告人的相关记录，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，缩写AOUSC）的刑事案卷。刑事案件中的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名被告人对应一条记录。每条记录包含案件受理时的法庭审理相关数据，以及最多五项被控罪名的罪名编码。（由于辩诉交易、法官或陪审团的裁决变动，案件审结时的最严重指控可能与案件受理时的初始指控存在差异。）若被告人面临多项指控，“最严重”罪名将依据各指控对应的法定最高刑，通过罪名层级体系进行判定。本数据文件既包含AOUSC原始案卷中的变量，也包含用于标识数据子集的额外分析变量，即“SAF变量”（SAF variables），此类变量与《联邦司法统计汇编》（Compendium of Federal Justice Statistics）中表4.1-4.5及表5.1-5.6所刊载的统计数据相关。为保护自然人身份信息，包含姓名、社会安全号码（Social Security number）等敏感信息的变量已被替换为空值，日期字段中的日份信息也已做脱敏处理。本数据集是阿特公司（Abt）与美国司法统计局（Bureau of Justice Statistics）联合设计的系列数据之一，数据集及相关文档均由阿特公司编制完成。