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Philadelphia Court Outcomes
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Figures are built from public docket sheets published on the Pennsylvania Unified Judicial System (UJS) portal. Coverage is limited to criminal cases heard in the Philadelphia courts.
Coverage begins on January 1, 2025 and is anchored to the date of the disposition or sentencing event, not the filing date. A case filed earlier is included when its qualifying event happened on or after that date.
Every figure is a historical aggregate: a summary of how charges were resolved in past Philadelphia cases during the covered period. Results describe groups of past cases as a whole, never any individual case.
These figures are historical summaries — they are not a prediction of any future outcome. Past distributions do not predict what a court will decide in any current or future case.
This site does not provide legal advice. Nothing here is a substitute for consulting a licensed attorney about a specific situation.
Every figure is shown with its sample size: the number of records it summarizes (charge dispositions for outcome figures, and individual sentence components for sentencing figures). Figures built from more data are more stable, so the sample size appears on every figure to show how much data stands behind it.
When a figure rests on a small sample, it is labeled as thin data and displayed with that warning rather than hidden. Small samples can shift noticeably as new cases arrive, so thin-data figures should be read with extra caution. At this stage most judge-specific figures are thin: the thin-data warning is the norm for judge-level results, and judge-level coverage deepens as collection continues.
Outcomes and sentences are attributed at the level of the individual charge, not the docket. A single docket can carry several charges, each resolved differently, so charge-level figures can differ from a whole-case reading.
Sentencing distributions summarize the sentence types recorded for charges that reached sentencing. A single sentencing event can include several components (for example probation plus a fine), and each component is counted as its own entry, so the sentencing sample size counts sentence components rather than sentenced charges. It is measured separately from the outcome sample size and can be smaller or larger: not every disposed charge reaches sentencing, while each charge that does can contribute more than one component. Sentencing figures may be unavailable for some charges. Sentencing dates are recorded independently of disposition dates: the two usually coincide, but a small share of sentencing dates fall earlier, and whether a sentencing event is inside the covered period is decided by the sentencing date itself.
Coverage starts on January 1, 2025, so earlier history is absent. Collection is ongoing: the covered records are a growing subset of Philadelphia criminal cases, and figures change as newly collected records are aggregated. Docket sheets are summaries and may be amended after we aggregate them. Aggregation groups many distinct dispositions into broad categories, and some charges have little or no data yet. Where the data is thin, the figures say so. Records whose outcome or judge attribution is unclear are excluded from the figures automatically rather than resolved by hand, and in this version no figure is adjusted or corrected manually after aggregation — a process for that is planned as future work.