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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 is communicating what it is doing and the outcomes of its work.
  • Efficiency. Ensuring that the State's Attorney's Office is best utilizing resources and being good stewards of public funding.
  • Community Safety and Well-Being. Ensuring that the State's Attorney's Office is addressing serious crime and protecting and serving victims.
  • Justice and Fairness. Ensuring that the State's Attorney's Office is identifying and prioritizing actions to identify potential disparities at points of prosecutorial discretion and to ensure the fair treatment of victims and defendants.
  • Data-driven Decision-making. Ensuring that the State's Attorney's Office is able identify and track successes and make improvements when necessary in order to ensure decisions are grounded in systematically collected data.

How can you use this dashboard?

You can use this dashboard to understand how the State's Attorney's Office operates. You will have the ability to look at criminal trends and how cases are filed and resolved over time. The charts show key decision points and the data stories provide a deep dive into specific issues addressed by the SA’s Office.  

This dashboard focuses on a limited set of case processing outcomes. In addition to describing basic demographic patterns in the data, the dashboard examines whether the charges against a defendant are dismissed prior to a conviction, and whether the number, severity, or type of charges are reduced between indictment and conviction. 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, were not reported reliably in the case management data. We elaborate on these and other important study limitation in the Preliminary Conclusions section at the end of the dashboard.

Data Limitations and Improvements

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

This dashboard presents case-level analyses. Data were originally provided at the count and charge level for all criminal defendants in Montgomery County Circuit 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 State’s Attorney's Office 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 Montgomery County State’s Attorney’s Office (MCSAO), led by Mr. John McCarthy, and a team of researchers from the University of Maryland, George Mason University, Towson University, and the Prosecutorial Performance Indicators project with funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Microsoft Justice Reform Initiative, Florida International University, and Loyola University Chicago. As part of this partnership, MCSAO provided case management data to the research team for all cases filed or disposed of in Circuit Court from 2018-2022. This dashboard summarizes preliminary results from these data.