The data contain records of defendants in criminal cases filed in United States District Court during fiscal year 1996. 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.