State Attorney General’s Office launches prosecution data dashboard

Information about how criminal cases are filed and resolved in Frederick County will be more easily accessible with the launch of a new prosecution data dashboard Tuesday.

The control panel is online at: data.samaryland.org/frederickDeveloped by the Prosecutor’s Office Performance Indicators (PPI) project using data from the Frederick County State’s Attorney’s Office’s internal case management system.

It includes data such as the number of cases filed by year, court and crime type; speed of resolution of different types of cases; and how cases are resolved based on the defendant’s race and ethnicity.

Frederick County State’s Attorney Charlie Smith said at a news conference Tuesday that the data contained in the dashboard can be used internally to ensure cases are distributed evenly and “to ensure that an individual or a unit is not overburdened or overworked.”

Externally, the data contained in the dashboard can be used by the public to analyze the fairness of charging decisions and case outcomes, Smith said.

“I want the public to make a well-informed decision about what we do as prosecutors in our jurisdictions,” Smith said. “Our job is to hold other people accountable, and we look forward to being held accountable, too.”

The Frederick County State’s Attorney’s Office is the second prosecutor’s office in Maryland to create a data dashboard on the project, after the Montgomery County State’s Attorney’s Office, Melba Pearson, who co-directs the PPI project with Florida International University, said Tuesday. .

Pearson said the PPI project is currently working with prosecutors’ offices in Prince George’s County, Charles County and Baltimore City. Data dashboards for these jurisdictions are expected to be published within the next year.

More than 40 prosecutors’ offices across the country have launched data dashboards in collaboration with the PPI project, Pearson said.

Currently, Pearson said the dashboards are being developed at no cost to taxpayers in participating jurisdictions using grant funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Microsoft Justice Reform Initiative.

Pearson said funding for the project under the current grant will “start to taper off” at the end of 2026, but work with local governments will continue after that point.

“Once the PPI project leaves Frederick County, we will be at a point where we will probably have a pretty large budget request to be able to continue to provide these measurements and analytics to the public and whoever,” Smith said at the press conference, “other people are dealing with them.”

Pearson said he’s “very hopeful” the Maryland General Assembly can create a funding stream that will support data dashboards for all of the state’s prosecutors’ offices.

Trends in the District

Don Stemen, another co-director of the PPI project at Loyola University Chicago, said Tuesday that certain trends observed in Frederick County’s dashboard mirror those seen nationwide as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

For example, the number of cases filed in Frederick County in 2019 was 5,236, with 3,763 in District Court and 1,473 in Circuit Court.

All of these figures decreased in 2020; A total of 2,886 cases were filed, 2,177 in the District Court and 709 in the District Court.

The number of cases filed in each court and overall has increased each year since then, but the numbers are still lower than before the pandemic.

A total of 3,719 cases were filed in Frederick County in 2023. Of these, 2,529 were filed in the District Court and 1,190 were filed in the Circuit Court.

The average number of days it takes to resolve felony cases in Frederick County followed a similar pattern, reaching 366 days in the third quarter of 2021, then trending downward to pre-pandemic low 200s by 2023, Stemen said.

Regarding racial and ethnic disparities, Frederick County’s data show that the proportion of defendants receiving stet (a conditional stay of all hearings in a case as requested by the prosecutor) is nearly the same regardless of whether the defendant is Black, Hispanic, or Hispanic. white.

Smith said in an email Tuesday that the sentencing guidelines worksheet used by the Frederick County State’s Attorney’s Office includes separate questions for race and Hispanic or Latinx, so an individual can be identified as Black, white or both in addition to being Hispanic or Latino. He also wrote that it could be recorded. Latin.

In about 20% of cases that meet the guidelines, the arresting officer’s charging affidavit includes no information indicating that the defendant is Hispanic or Latino, Smith wrote.

As a result, Smith wrote, “the Hispanic population is likely underreported in the data analyzed.”

The data dashboard also shows that a lower proportion of black defendants receive probation before sentencing compared to white and Hispanic defendants; This allows a person to avoid conviction if they comply with certain conditions.

In 2023, the dashboard shows 16% of Hispanic defendants and 17% of white defendants received pre-sentence probation. In comparison, 12% of Black defendants received probation before sentencing in 2023.

Regarding the greater racial disparity between defendants receiving pre-sentence probation, known as PBJ, compared to Stet, Smith noted that “judges have sole authority to grant PBJ.”

While pre-sentence probation is an option in most criminal and traffic cases in Maryland, Smith wrote that some defendants are ineligible because of their charges and criminal history.

Defendants charged with DUI or driving while intoxicated within 10 years of a prior charge and defendants charged with a second or subsequent offense involving controlled dangerous substances may not receive pretrial probation.

“The difference may be that white people commit DUI/DWIs at a higher rate, where first-time offenders are almost always given a PBJ. Or people of color may later commit CDS crimes that are not PBJ-eligible,” Smith wrote in an email. .

“Although the statistical difference was not significant according to our data analysts, this metric tells us we need to dig deeper into why this is occurring,” Smith continued.

The PPI project hopes to update the Frederick County and Montgomery County state’s attorney’s offices’ dashboards with 2024 data in the coming months, Pearson said.