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Racial Disparities in Virginia Felony Court Cases, 2007-2015

Metadata Updated: March 12, 2025

Research examining racial disparities in the court system has typically focused on only one of the discrete stages in the criminal process (the charging, conviction, or sentencing stages), with the majority of the literature focusing on the sentencing stage. The literature has thus largely ignored the key early decisions made by the prosecutor such as their decision to prosecute, the determination of preliminary charges, charge reductions, and plea negotiations. Further, the few studies that have examined whether racial disparities arise in prosecutorial charging decisions are rarely able to follow these cases all the way through the criminal court process. This project sought to expand the literature by using a dataset on felony cases filed in twelve Virginia counties between 2007 through 2015 whereby each criminal incident can be followed from the initial charge filing stage to the final disposition. Using each felony case as the unit of analysis, this data was used to evaluate whether African Americans and whites that are arrested for the same felony crimes have similar final case outcomes.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: us-pd

Downloads & Resources

Dates

Metadata Created Date February 13, 2023
Metadata Updated Date March 12, 2025

Metadata Source

Harvested from DOJ JSON

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date February 13, 2023
Metadata Updated Date March 12, 2025
Publisher National Institute of Justice
Maintainer
Identifier 4212
Data First Published 2022-01-27T10:40:53
Language eng
Data Last Modified 2022-01-27T10:40:53
Public Access Level public
Aicategory Not AI-ready
Bureau Code 011:21
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Metadata Catalog ID https://www.justice.gov/data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id 33a246ce-b62b-4bf3-ab9d-6b7cc1b83ce0
Harvest Source Id 3290e90a-116f-42fc-86ac-e65521ef3b68
Harvest Source Title DOJ JSON
Internalcontactpoint {"@type": "vcard:Contact", "fn": "Jennifer Scherer", "hasEmail": "mailto:Jennifer.Scherer@usdoj.gov"}
Jcamsystem {"acronym": "OJP_EXT", "id": 8, "name": "External system not available in CSAM"}
License http://www.usa.gov/publicdomain/label/1.0/
Metadatamodified 9/2/2022 6:22:00 PM
Program Code 011:060
Publisher Hierarchy Office of Justice Programs > National Institute of Justice
Sourceidentifier https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR38274
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 4ce3ca5e993311e336bf6952c4f88a8a32ced11f7c222dbd8b22585f553948da
Source Schema Version 1.1

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