USING DATA TO MAKE OBJECTIVE ARGUMENTS
We all know the old saying, “I became a lawyer because I can’t do math.”
While thankfully math and criminal defense practice do not frequently overlap, sentencing and charging data is an often overlooked, but highly compelling, tool that criminal defense attorneys should be using in sentencing arguments and plea negotiations and when advising clients.
Consider the following scenarios for just a taste of the type of charging and sentencing data analysis that 2nd-Chair has recently done:
A prosecutor proposes a 15-year prison sentence for a juvenile client in a vehicular homicide case. While this sentence feels out of whack, it is a true one-of-one outlier. Not a single juvenile, charged as an adult, in the past 24 years, across the entire state of Colorado had been subjected to a 15-year sentence for the same offense. While this data did not convince the District Attorney to adjust their offer it did convince the judge at sentencing.
The prosecution charges your client as a habitual offender—based on prior possession offenses—in an attempted murder case, thereby raising the sentencing stakes from a 16–48-year range to a mandatory 96-year term. While this sentence seems unnecessarily harsh for any case, let alone a non-death case, sentencing data analysis was able to show that in the relevant county, over the previous 10 years, the average plea deal in first-degree murder cases was approximately 30 years. Therefore, the client would have been in a better sentencing position had he committed first-degree murder and sought a plea deal instead of exercising his right to trial in an attempted murder case.
The prosecution charges your young adult client in a murder case as a habitual offender, seeking a functional life sentence in the event the jury does not convict of first-degree murder. Sentencing data was able to show that this client would have been the youngest person—around 15 years younger than the average age—to receive a habitual sentence on this charge since the judicial branch began keeping these statistics.
Attorney-client needs to know the historical sentencing range for the specific DF1 charged so they can best advise their client of the legitimacy of the offer and risks of going to trial.
This data is publicly available through the State Court Administrator’s Office under a Chief Justice Directive, but accurately analyzing the data is a time consuming, unintuitive, and a painstaking process. Let 2nd-Chair do this work for you and provide you with the creative, data-driven support you need.
If you are not using data in your client advisements, plea negotiations, and sentencing arguments, reach out to the team at 2nd-Chair to add an objective, persuasive tool to your criminal defense practice.