About
Our Mission
To empower legal professionals to realize fairness and equity for their clients by providing transparency into sentencing in the US criminal justice system using data science techniques.
Why DAATE?
DAATE seeks to explore: "is there is racial disparity in sentencing in the US criminal justice system?" by providing greater transparency into sentencing of Black and White Americans in the United States (US) criminal justice system through the use of data science techniques. Leveraging the Florida Department of Corrections data from 2004-2016, DAATE is intended to be an advisory tool for defense attorneys to gain additional sentencing insight about potential inequity in the Florida legal system. By providing transparency into sentencing of Black and White Americans, a defense attorney can use DAATE to prepare for trial to seek fair and equal treatment for their client during sentencing through simple yet impactful data science driven analytics. The DAATE MVP provides historical sentencing analytics, a view into sentencing disparity through causality, and provides sentence time predictions that a defense attorney can use to prepare for plea bargain or trial sentencing negotiation for their clients.
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Incarcerations
Approximately five times more Black Americans are being incarcerated than that of White Americans
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Sentencing
Recent research suggests that Black Americans receive as much as 19.1% longer sentences than White American offenders
Million Active Attorneys in the US in 2021
Thousand active Defense Attorneys in the US
Million Criminal Cases Filed in the US in 2020
US States Providing Data
Approach
View our Approach
For more details on data, architecture, models, next steps, 1) select a filter 2) hover over an item and 3) click the details icon. Or access from the dropdown menu.
- All
- Data
- Architecture
- Predictive Model
- Causal Model
- Next Steps
Try It
View our Dashboards
Try our MVP Dashboards.
Explore Florida Department of Corrections Data
Dive into Florida Department of Corrections data from 2004-2016
Florida Sentencing Model Results
Use this dashboard to view overall causal and predictive model results for a subset of Florida circuits
Florida Sentencing Details by Judge
Use this dashboard to select a judge to see the corresponding sentencing data associated to them.
Florida Sentencing Bias & Disparity Detection Engine Results
See the results from leveraging the Bias Detection Engine on Miami data for comparison to DAATE results.
Testimonials
View our Testimonials
We are grateful for the feedback during this journey.
Michael Braga
Pulitzer Winning Journalist/Investigations Editor for the Arizona Republic
Our team of reporters and editors at the Sarasota Herald Tribune and at USA TODAY always believed that there was tremendous potential to use criminal justice data to help bring about equity in sentencing and to shine a light on judges, prosecutors and law enforcement officials who might not even understand the ways in which they are tilting justice in favor of one group or another. We are grateful that the team that built DAATE recognized that potential and created the foundation for a tool that could be used by defense attorneys to right some the injustices that have plagued the United States for hundreds of years.
Belinda Cheng
Board Member of American Equity and Justice Group
The work that the DAATE team has been able to accomplish in such a short time is remarkable. Building in statistical significance and p-values is such a great idea to help bring confidence to the disparity charts. I'm hopeful that we can leverage this great work into the Equity Dashboard that the American Equity and Justice Group has been building, and to help us gain more momentum towards bringing more equity to the legal system nationwide.
Team
Our Hardworking Team
The team that created DAATE
Jackie Nichols
Chief Architect
Robert Ling
Data Engineer
Song Park
Data Scientist
Hao Wu
Data ScientistF.A.Q
Frequently Asked Questions
The following are the top questions that came up during our usability tests:
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Can DAATE tell me if a particular judge is biased?
No. DAATE is not an assessment of individual judges and may not be indicative of an individual's entire judicial record.
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Who provided input into the creation of the MVP tool?
We were very fortunate and grateful to all the people who assisted us during our MVP. We had a range of people from UC Berkeley instructors, journalists, and lawyers involved in the process. For a complete list please see our acknowledgement page.
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How have you addressed the ethical concerns with such a tool?
The DAATE team has worked hard to highlight and explain the data science techniques used in the creation of the tool. We've also included a Terms Of Use page that addresses some of the concerns.
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Why was Florida Department of Corrections chosen?
The DAATE team was inspired by an investigative series by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune titled 'Bias on the Bench' that found that trial judges in Florida were sentencing black defendants to more time behind bars than whites. The DAATE team decided to explore the same data but with data science techniques.
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Will more cities be added?
The purpose of the MVP was to determine the viability of the tool and if extending it to more cities would make sense. The DAATE team is in the process of evaluating the usefulness of DAATE and will provide a more detailed update on future versions soon.
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What other data science techniques could be explored?
The DAATE team had considered applying natural language processing (NLP) to court transcripts to determine sentiment analysis in the hopes that this additional information can add additional context to the sentencing of defendants.
Contact
Contact Us
If you have questions or feedback please contact us.