Court clerk or records office
Usually holds case, disposition, and sentence records.
Ask for the criminal case-management export, coverage notes, data dictionary, and correction history.
Records request guide
Bring CourtScope to your city
A publishable city starts with a complete, authorized, privacy-reviewed dataset—not a handful of cases or a scraped search screen.
Who to contact
Start with the office that keeps the official records
Office names differ across the country. Use general government directories and the court’s official website to identify the records custodian.
Court administration or court IT
Often understands databases, judge identifiers, retired systems, and export limits.
Contact this office when the clerk can provide documents but not a complete machine-readable dataset.
State court administrative office
May hold statewide or multi-county extracts.
Ask whether it maintains a central criminal case warehouse and whether local courts must approve release.
County or city public-records officer
Routes requests under the local public-records process.
Use this contact when the court directs records requests through a central portal or legal office.
Prosecutor, corrections, or jail data office
May hold fields missing from court exports.
These offices can sometimes fill documented gaps, but their data must be reconciled with the court source.
Local elections office
Usually holds election and office-term facts, not sentencing data.
Use it later to verify election context. Election facts never change the Disparity Score.
Before you send
Ask for a complete export
Request the full declared court scope and explain that omitted years, divisions, judges, or sentence fields must be identified.
Hard rule: Incomplete data is rejected. It is not published as “almost ready.”
- Official or authorized source with clear reuse terms
- Every declared court and division is covered
- Stable case identifiers and verified judge identities
- Race, offense, prior record, plea/trial, age, gender, and disposition fields
- Sentence date, incarceration outcome, and sentence length
- Documented date coverage with no unexplained gaps
- A data dictionary and correction history
- Privacy review and a safe public projection
Privacy rule: Do not commit raw personally identifying information to a public repository. CourtScope’s repository intake accepts only a complete de-identified package after privacy review.
Copy and adapt
Sample email requests
Initial request for complete sentencing data
Subject: Request for complete criminal sentencing data Hello, I am requesting an electronic export of criminal case and sentencing records for [court or jurisdiction] covering [date range]. Please include all divisions and all disposed criminal cases in the declared scope. Requested fields include stable case and judge identifiers, judge name, court and division, offense classification, prior-record information, plea or trial status, disposition, sentence date, incarceration-to-serve outcome, sentence length, and the race, age band, and gender fields maintained in the source system. Please also provide a data dictionary, coverage notes, known gaps, correction history, and the office’s reuse terms. A machine-readable CSV or JSON export is preferred. Please tell me whether another office is the correct custodian for any part of this request. Thank you, [Name]
Follow-up when coverage is unclear
Subject: Follow-up on criminal sentencing data request Hello, I am following up on my request dated [date]. Could you confirm whether the office has all records needed to cover every declared court, division, and year in the request? Please identify any missing years, excluded case types, retired systems, judge-name changes, amended sentences, or fields that cannot be exported. If another custodian holds part of the dataset, please provide that office’s general contact information. Thank you, [Name]
What to say when an office offers PDFs only
Thank the office, then ask whether the same records can be exported from the case-management system in CSV, JSON, spreadsheet, fixed-width, or database format. Explain that a machine-readable export is necessary to check completeness across all cases.
What to say when different offices hold different fields
Ask each custodian for a stable join key, field definitions, date coverage, and known exclusions. Do not assume two files can be combined merely because case numbers look similar.
What happens next
From complete package to live city
Privacy review
Remove prohibited personal fields and confirm the public projection is safe.
Repository intake
Place the complete de-identified batch, manifest, and data dictionary in the incoming city folder.
Automated validation
The workflow checks source authority, schema, court coverage, date continuity, judge identity, privacy, and statistical publication gates.
Publish or reject
Passing batches generate the city dashboard and downloads. Failing batches move to the rejection folder with reasons.
Admin retention
Processed packages appear in the admin cleanup queue and can be removed after the retention period with explicit confirmation.