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Phila 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. Each results page also shows a data release code — a short identifier naming the aggregate release its figures come from; every figure on the page comes from that single release.
Coverage begins on January 1, 2025 and applies that date twice: only cases filed on or after January 1, 2025 are covered, and only disposition or sentencing events on or after that date are counted. A case filed earlier is excluded, even when its disposition or sentencing happened after coverage began.
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 the amount of data behind it, counted in the unit the figure summarizes: outcome figures show the number of records (charge dispositions), the sentencing detail shows the number of sentence components, and the sentencing rates show the number of sentenced convictions behind them. Figures built from more data are more stable, so these counts appear beside every figure.
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.
Volume figures count charges, and each charge is counted once. When a Municipal Court charge is held for court, the same charge continues on a new Court of Common Pleas case. Where the docket records let that continuation be traced — the Common Pleas case names its originating Municipal Court docket, the offense tracking number matches, and the charge lines match by original sequence and statute — the two records are treated as one charge, counted at its Common Pleas stage. A held charge whose continuation cannot be traced yet, most often because the Common Pleas case has not been filed or collected yet, stays counted as held for court and is re-checked on every data refresh. Behind each charges-seen figure, every counted charge sits in exactly one stage: recorded final outcome, held for court, still awaiting a disposition, or disposed but excluded from the percentages under the coverage rules above — and the stages always add up to the charges-seen total. Charges that cannot be matched to a charge type in our directory are not attributed to any charge page and are excluded from charge-level volume figures.
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 detail 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 often coincide, but sentencing can also be recorded later than the disposition and, in a small share of records, earlier, and whether a sentencing event is inside the covered period is decided by the sentencing date itself. Alongside that component detail, results pages lead with sentencing rates by conviction where those rates are available: for each sentence category, the share of sentenced convictions whose sentence included that category at least once. A conviction sentenced to probation and a fine counts once under each, so the percentages can sum to more than 100. The denominator is sentenced convictions — convictions with at least one public sentencing component recorded — and convictions with no public sentencing record in the collected data are excluded from the rates and disclosed as a count beside them. Where sentence lengths are recorded, pages show the median of the minimum and the median of the maximum length, converted to months using a 30-day month and a 360-day year; when the two medians are equal a single figure is shown. Some records state a single length or only a maximum; for those the minimum is treated as equal to the stated length, and the share of such records is tracked per category in the underlying aggregates. Charge pages also show the mix of charge grades among convictions, listed from most to least common; convictions with no grade recorded on the docket are grouped under "no recorded grade".
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. At this stage, dismissals are underrepresented in the figures: dismissals tend to take longer to resolve than convictions, and records from cases still awaiting a final outcome are not counted until one is recorded, so dismissal figures fill in more slowly than other outcomes.