Earlier this year, Ideastream Public Media shared with you stories produced by The Marshall Project examining sentencing in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court.
The digital stories and on-air conversations looked at the disparities in the judicial system, where most of the judges and prosecutors are white and most of the defendants are Black. And it explored who was choosing those judges, finding that the mostly white judges who sentenced the mostly Black defendants were elected by mostly white suburban voters.
The data allowed reporters to determine how some judges were more prone to incarcerating Black defendants charged with theft or low-level drug possession.
Anyone with access to the internet can look up felony court cases in Cuyahoga County one by one. But understanding how case outcomes vary by judge or by a defendant’s race is impossible without being able to examine all the cases together.
The court doesn’t release that data publicly, and The Marshall Project and Ideastream Public Media believe that transparency is essential to understanding flaws in the criminal justice system, including the disproportionate incarceration of Black Clevelanders.
The Marshall Project's continuing work scraping court data provides a deep well of information that can be used to answer questions directly from community members about the court system.
Find the answers to questions your friends and neighbors submitted using this new tool. And if you've got a question, please submit it below.
Not sure what to ask? Here’s an example of a question we’ve answered.
