Definitions

Criminal Legal Terms

Arrest: Law enforcement takes an individual into legal custody in response to the suspicion of an individual’s violation of the law. Law enforcement uses the standard of “probable cause” to determine whether an individual should be arrested, given information provided by witnesses or other evidence.

Bail or bond: The amount of money set by the court for the release of a person accused of a crime. It is designed to assure the person's presence for trial and may contain additional non-monetary conditions of release.

Beyond a reasonable doubt: the legal burden of proof required to convict a defendant in a criminal case at trial. The prosecution bears the burden of proving that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt – in other words, that there is no other reasonable explanation that can come from the evidence presented.

Bond Hearing: If in custody a bond hearing is held to provide argument, evidence, or testimony for the Court to use in determining an appropriate amount of bail to be set for a defendant.

Case: A case is a collection of all charges against a defendant arising out of a single incident. In this dashboard, cases are classified by their most serious charge (the crime that a defendant is accused of committing). 

Crime: An act prohibited by statute.

Conviction: The outcome of criminal case when a defendant is determined to be guilty of a crime.

Defendant: The person against whom a criminal case is pending.

Filing a case: Prosecutors review arrest reports/referrals for each felony case. If the prosecutor determines the evidence supports a good faith belief in conviction beyond a reasonable doubt, the case is filed and continues until resolution.

In custody: When an individual is being detained by law enforcement, the court, or another legal entity and is not free to leave.

Plea agreement: an agreement between the prosecution and the defendant defining the specific conditions and crimes to which a defendant chooses to plead guilty.

Pretrial detention: Defendants who are detained pretrial are incarcerated in jail prior to resolution of the case.

Probable cause: Evidentiary reason for arrest or to obtain a warrant. A reasonable basis for believing that a crime has been committed.

Recidivism:  For the purposes of our dashboard, defendants who recidivate are those who have a new criminal case (misdemeanor or felony) filed after case resolution. This might include a new law violation or a violation of a defendant’s term of probation.

Referred: A case is referred when it is submitted to the State Attorney’s Office for review. This includes investigations, arrests, warrants, notices to appear, citations, and other requests for prosecution.

Victim: A victim is a person who has suffered direct or threatened physical psychological, or financial harm as a result of the commission or attempted commission of a crime.

Charge Levels

Felony: Felonies are the most serious criminal violations of Maryland state laws, and include crimes such murder, rape, robbery, and manufacture and delivery of illegal drugs. Sentences following conviction for a felony may include fines, probation, community corrections, and prison.

Misdemeanor: Misdemeanors are less serious criminal violations of Maryland state laws, punishable by a sentence of up to 364 days in county jail. A person convicted of a misdemeanor cannot be sentenced to state prison, unless the misdemeanor sentence is served simultaneously (concurrently) with a felony sentence. Misdemeanors cover a wide range of offenses, including domestic violence, simple assault, obstructing a police officer.

In addition to the type of offense, select analyses also examine the overall severity of an offense using a Crime Severity Scale that was created based on the statutory maximum prison term and the maximum fine allowed under Maryland law. Using statutory maxima, charges were grouped into 16 severity levels that range from 3 months or less to life imprisonment. Table 1 below summarizes the levels in the severity scale. Common Law offenses that do not specify a statutory maximum are classified according to their most similar offenses (e.g. “affray” is coded with disorderly conduct).

Charge Types

Person: Includes murder, robbery, carjacking, felony and misdemeanor assault, domestic violence, reckless endangerment, child abuse, kidnapping, human trafficking, false imprisonment, stalking, violation of of protective orders, posting private images, hate crimes and harassment.

Property/Economic: Includes arson, burglary, forgery, fraud, extortion, cybercrime, malicious destruction of property, ID theft, financial crimes against the elderly, motor vehicle theft, theft, and trespassing.

Drugs: Includes possession of a controlled dangerous substances, possession with intent to distribute, distribution (including cannabis), manufacture of controlled substance (including cannabis), possession/sale of drug paraphernalia, public consumption and use in vehicles of cannabis, and other drug charges.

DUI: Includes Driving Under the Influence of Alcohol, Driving Under the Influence of Drugs, Driving While Ability Impaired by Alcohol, and Driving While Ability Impaired by Drugs charges.

Sex Offense: Includes sexual assault (including sexual assault on a child and sexual assault on a child by one in a position of trust), sexual contact, sexual exploitation, incest, enticement, internet luring, sexual human trafficking, prostitution charges, indecent exposure and public indecency, and some invasion of privacy charges. 

Traffic: Includes fleeing and eluding, speed contests, driver’s license violations, driving without a license, driving without insurance, leaving the scene of an accident, reckless driving, and other vehicle/traffic charges.

Weapons: Includes possession of a weapon, including a firearm, carrying a concealed weapon, prohibited use of a weapon, illegal discharge, straw purchase, and other weapons charges.

Other: Includes contributing to the delinquency of a minor, accessory to a crime, bribery or tampering, retaliation against judge/prosecutor, disarming a peace officer, disorderly conduct, riot, false report/emergency, escape, introduction/possession of contraband in detention, obstruction of an officer/official, endangering public transportation, perjury, resisting arrest, tampering with evidence, violation of bail bond or custody, alcohol offenses, bias motivated crimes, cruelty to animals, hunting/wildlife violations, gaming/gambling, eluding, wiretapping/eavesdropping/abuse of telephone, and sex offender registration violations.

Dispositions

Dismissed:  A case is dismissed when the criminal charges are terminated after the case is filed, either by the court or by the prosecutor. There can be several reasons for why a case is dismissed, including: a lack of evidence or unavailability of a witness as part of a plea agreement. This category also includes cases that are referred to diversion and successfully complete diversion programming.

Plea Dismissal: It is not uncommon for defendants to have multiple criminal cases going on at the same time. A defendant may be able to resolve such a situation by pleading guilty to some of the cases in exchange for others being dismissed. So, if a defendant pleads guilty to a case in exchange for the dismissal of two others, the case plead to would be categorized as plead guilty, whereas each of the cases dismissed would be categorized as “plea dismissals”.

Stet: A conditional stay of all further proceedings in a case. On motion of the State’s Attorney, the court may indefinitely postpone trial of a charge by marking the charge “stet” on the docket.

Probation Before Judgment: A conditional avoidance of imposition of sentence after conviction; failure to satisfy the terms and conditions may cause imposition of sentence after a finding of violation of probation. A defendant may plead not guilty and enter into an agreement with the State to accept a probation before judgment. The court may find facts justifying a finding of guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, defer entry of a conviction and place defendant on probation before judgment subject to reasonable conditions.

Acquitted: A case is acquitted when a judge or jury at trial determines that the defendant is not guilty of the crime for which the individual has been charged.

Guilty: A defendant is guilty when they admit a factual basis for the plea and acknowledges guilt for a charge, sometimes in exchange for a more lenient sentence, or when found guilty at trial of any charge.

Sentences

Across this dashboard each case is categorized by its most serious sentence (in the order listed below). A sentence to incarceration includes any of the following sentences:

Prison, or Department of Corrections, is a sentence to state prison.

Community Corrections is a sentence to a community corrections facility, sometimes called a halfway house. 

Jail is a sentence to local incarceration, generally for misdemeanor cases.

*Non-incarceral sentences includes any of the following:*

Probation is a sentence to supervision of a defendant involving standard terms and conditions, as well as special conditions imposed by a court. 

Time served is a sentence of jail time that has already been completed by the defendant during the course of the case. 

Community service is a sentence to complete a certain number of hours of “useful public service”, generally run by local non-profit organizations.

Fines are the fixed monetary sanctions imposed by a judge based on the severity of the crime committed and the ability of the offender to pay.

Fees are charges imposed to cover system costs.

Other Dashboard Groupings

Attempted: Defendant is charged with engaging in conduct constituting a substantial step towards committing a crime. 

Violent Crime: Violent Crime includes charges categorized by the Maryland State Commission on Criminal Sentencing Policy.

Demographics

Age: Defendant and victim age is calculated at the time of the case is filed.

Gender: Gender is defined as determined by law enforcement in the following categories: Male, Female, Other.

Ethnicity: For purposes of these indicators, ethnicity is defined as Hispanic or non-Hispanic.

Race: Race is defined as the racial category as determined by law enforcement in the following categories: Hispanic, Black, Native American, Asian, White, and Other.

The Frederick County State's Attorney's Office captures defendant race, which includes White, Black, Asian, Native American (Indian), Hispanic, and Other. However, the data patterns suggest that Hispanic origin is not reliably recorded in the data.

Given historical disproportionality and disparity in the justice system, in presenting metrics, we have chosen to compare outcomes for Black and Brown individuals against White individuals. We hope this provides clear information on the presence/extent of differences by race/ethnicity. In addition, we have significantly less confidence that Hispanic individuals are accurately identified in the current dataset.

Some race/ethnic groups have small sample sizes. To address issues of small sample size, see measures taken in the Methods section below.

The District Population, by Race/Ethnicity 2020 Census was generated from information publicly available through the United States Census Bureau. In 2020 the U.S. Census collected race and ethnicity as two questions: one for ethnicity, “Hispanic or Latino” and “Not Hispanic or Latino”, and another for race with six categories: “White,” “Black or African American,” “American Indian or Alaska Native,” “Asian”, “Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander”, and “Some Other Race”. To best compare the general population to the population of individuals with criminal cases filed, we have used similar logic to categorize individuals. If the individual is identified as Hispanic and White, they are categorized as Hispanic. If the individual’s race is logged as Black, they are categorized as Black regardless of their ethnicity.  If the individual’s race is logged as Native American (“American Indian or Alaska Native” or “Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander”) they are categorized as Native American regardless of their ethnicity. Individuals categorized as “Some Other Race” and Hispanic are categorized as Hispanic. Individuals that selected two or more races, regardless of their ethnicity, are categorized in the “Multiracial or Another Race” category.

Data Terms

Average: The average of a set of numbers is the sum of the numbers divided by the total number of values in the set. For example, to find the average of 24, 55, 17, 87 and 100, first find the sum of the numbers: 24 + 55 + 17 + 87 + 100 = 283 and divide by 5 to get 56.6.

Median: The median is the value separating the higher half of a data sample from the lower half. It may be thought of as the "middle" value of a data set. For example, in the data set {1, 3, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9}, the median is 6, the fourth number in the sample.

Outlier: An outlier is a data point that differs from other observations, is much bigger or much smaller.

Quintile: ​​A quintile is a statistical value of a data set that represents 20% of a given population, so the lowest quintile represents the lowest fifth of the data, while the upper quintile represents the highest fifth of the data.

Methods

Data for this report come from the Frederick County State's Attorney's Office's case management system and include information on misdemeanor and felony charges filed in Frederick County Circuit Court and District Court during January 2019 and December 2023.

We present data in six sections, summarizing information about different parts of the prosecution process. In each section we present: 

1. General trends, an overview of cases and characteristics 
2. Indicators, selected from the menu of 55 Prosecutorial Performance Indicators (PPIs), which are designed to measure capacity and efficiency, community safety and well-being, and fairness and justice. PPIs offer an array of metrics that can be tracked over time to inform decision making and policy development.

To address issues of small sample size, we implemented the following measures:

1. Presented some data points annually instead of quarterly.
2. When the quarterly measure was less than 20, we took a three month moving average. 
3. When the annual number was less than 20, we excluded the metric.