On 4 January 2011 00:47, Nick Bull <[email protected]> wrote: > Francis, > > Thank you for pointing out those caveats. You're absolutely right that > there are many reasons why a decision would be overturned that don't reflect > directly on the judge. To be honest, calling it "Rate My Judge" had more to > do with being snappy than anything else. Within the limited supply of data > there are no standout cases of a single judge being appealed against > particularly often, and if that proved to be the case with a larger data set > then that would be a noteworthy fact in itself. To that extent the text was > based on my supposition rather than the data. I've now reduced the emphasis > on judges and brought in some other factors, though the code has yet to > catch up of course.
Great. A high volume of successful appeals does indicate a failure somewhere in the system - whether its the judge, the rules of procedure, the court administration or the lawyers involved might need further investigation, but if there is a failure somewhere that's a bad thing. So, I think its a useful thing to do. Tim's point about it giving a wider public understanding of the legal system is also a good thing, even if nothing surprising is discovered. Crowdsourcing could achieve several things: - it could add useful tags such as whether new evidence was admitted (which changes things somewhat - the failure then is why was the evidence not available, which may be a police or defence failure) - appeal courts sometimes expressly criticise the judge (and its usually pretty clear they do) or expressly exonerate the judge (again usually pretty clearly, as in "the judge is not to be criticised....") - most serious offence type would be interesting since I suspect there's a strong correlation between asking for an appeal and the seriousness of the offence: a client is much more interested in appealing a life sentence than a 1 year sentence of imprisonment in most cases, at least they have much more invested. Also, I wonder if you could crowdsource bailii scraping somehow 8-)? Just because you can't spider it, doesn't mean individuals can't cut/paste a case into your system with its URL. Bailii do allow an RSS feed, so maybe that, plus a filter could give URL's for individuals to look at and then load up to your system. [ignoring any IP problems there might be in doing so] Some things that might be automatable via a scraper from other places are: - rank of judge appealed (you need an address from both houses of parliament to the Queen to sack a high court judge for instance, but a circuit judge is in theory easier to let go, still more a recorder) - any form of judicial statistic available > > The paragraph containing "This site is about judges' job performance" is > more intended to clarify that no attempt is being made to track individual > defendants/appellants through the system or to aggregate information about > sentencing, in the way suggested in this recent thread started by Ben > Goldacre. Yes - though it would be interesting to see that data "out there" as well. The Court Service is not (putting it as diplomatically as I can) the most efficient or up to date government body, so perhaps we'll have to wait a little while. > > Given more time it would be very much worth, as you say, trying to identify > the reason for an appeal. Alternatively looking for patterns in appeals by > type of offence, prosecution/defence counsel members and even location would > be interesting. Yes. NB there is (you may not be aware) a correlation between judge and type of offence. Offences are ranked in seriousness and then allocated to court centres and members of the judiciary based on that classification. Some crimes are so serious that they are normally heard before only a High Court judge or specially ticketed circuit judge. > > On a wider note, I think this kind of exploration has the potential to > surface some interesting things about the way the system works, or differs > from the popular imagination of how it works. For instance, the point you > make that a judge could rule based on claims about the law made by > interested parties which he/she doesn't have the opportunity to research > further. I think that's something that should be better known. Yes. Its why (on balance) live video feeds of proceedings might be a good thing. It might at least stop people thinking that judges use gavels 8-). I haven't been following any recent criminological research, so I have no idea about recent developments in studying judicial behaviour. It has been done in the past though. I have an *old* (1984 - so before judicial training or sentencing standards) report by the Oxford Centre for Criminological Research (Occasional Paper No. 10) on sentencing in the Crown Court, which looks at how judges form the view as to sentencing they did (and it was pretty bad in those days). It was based on surveys etc. I feel sure that some academic outfits have tried to do more up to date work of the same kind. I wonder if there's any analysis of the CCRC that could be done as well: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/nov/30/criminal-cases-review-commission-failed Anyway, good luck with all this. -- Francis Davey _______________________________________________ Mailing list [email protected] Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public
