/Criminal_Defendant_Equity

DS 1003 Machine Learning Term Project

Primary LanguageJupyter Notebook

Ensuring that criminal defendants are treated equally before the law is one of the most important imperatives of criminal justice institutions. It can be a challenging question to investigate empirically, however, due to data limitations and problems of causal inference. Working with extensive data crawled from public access websites, including the text of every criminal opinion issued by New York State's appellate courts between 2003 and 2017, and demographic data on all criminal defendants processed by New York State's Department of Corrections since the 1970s, we are building predictive models of criminal trial and appeal dispositions.