A ticking ‘social timebomb?’ An investigation into racial bias in court case outcomes in England and Wales

You can view Angela Sorsby's ADR UK blogpost on her research project here. 

The aim of the research is to use newly available de-identified Magistrates’ and Crown Court datasets, provided through the Data First programme, to increase our understanding of disparities between ethnic groups within the criminal justice system. Understanding these disparities, and identifying potential explanations, is a crucial step in addressing them, for which there is both a moral and economic imperative.

Specifically the project will examine relationships between ethnicity and

·       outcomes of cases, controlling for other factors such as age and severity of offence;

·       the extent of repeat court use (i.e. the same defendant is prosecuted on repeated occasions over a time period);

·       the proportion of convictions (compared to other outcomes) for each defendant over a specified time period, broken down for the magistrates’ and Crown Court;

·       the number of cases in which a defendant appears in the magistrates’ court prior to appearing in a Crown Court case.

 In addition the project will

·       compare outcomes of triable either way cases in the magistrates’ and Crown Court, taking account of other factors such as offence type;

·       consider the findings of this analysis in relation to disparity between ethnic groups, as BAME defendants are more likely to be tried in the Crown Court.