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Overview

Why did we develop this dashboard?

The dashboard seeks to support:

  • Transparency. Ensuring that the State's Attorney's Office (SAO) is communicating what it is doing and the outcomes of its work
  • Efficiency. Ensuring that the SAO is using resources wisely and being good stewards of public funding.
  • Community Safety and Well-Being. Ensuring that the SAO is addressing serious crime and protecting and serving victims.
  • Justice and Fairness. Ensuring that the SAO is identifying and addressing any possible disparities at points of prosecutorial discretion and to ensure the fair treatment of victims and defendants.
  • Data-driven Decision-making. Ensuring that the SAO is learning what is going well and where there is room for improvement, ensuring decisions are grounded in systematically collected data.

How can you use this dashboard?

You can use this dashboard to understand the work that the SAO does. You can use it to look at trends in cases filed and resolved over time and patterns in how individuals are treated. The charts show key decision points and future data stories will provide a deep dive into specific issues addressed by the SAO.  

This dashboard focuses on a limited set of case processing outcomes. In addition to describing basic filing trends and demographic patterns in the data, the dashboard examines case outcomes and a set of indicators to gauge office performance. Information was not available for a number of other potentially important case processing decisions (e.g., charge alterations between arrest to indictment, bail and sentence recommendations, pretrial detention outcomes, or detailed information on plea offers and whether they are accepted). Data on these and other potentially important decision points, including final sentences, are not reported reliably in the case management data. We are working to improve this data collection.

Data Limitations and Improvements

This dashboard is descriptive in nature and is meant to provide only a general summary of patterns in case processing.

This dashboard presents case-level analyses. Data were originally provided at the count and charge level for all criminal defendants in Frederick County Circuit Court and District Court during the study period. These data were aggregated up to the criminal case. A criminal case is defined as any set of charges recorded under the same SAO's identification number. The same criminal defendant can appear more than once in the data if they are charged with more than one criminal case.

Acknowledgements

This dashboard represents preliminary findings stemming from a research partnership between The Frederick County State’s Attorney’s Office, led by State's Attorney J. Charles "Charlie" Smith, III, and a team of researchers from the University of Maryland, and the Prosecutorial Performance Indicators project. As part of this partnership, the Frederick County State's Attorney's Office provided case management data to the research team for all cases filed or disposed of in Circuit Court and District Court from 2019-2023. This dashboard summarizes preliminary results from these data.