Between October 2006 and July of this year, judges in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on average sentenced 147 defendants in criminal cases. According to a new study, the city’s federal court had the smallest average criminal caseload of any federal court nationwide during that time.
The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, released the results yesterday of a new analysis of sentencing data from the federal courts. TRAC, which is based at Syracuse University, measured criminal caseloads by the number of defendants sentenced per judge; TRAC Co-Director Susan Long said they thought sentencings would be a useful measuring tool because most criminal cases in the federal courts end in a guilty plea or conviction.
