Sentencing Disparities in Macau: An Analysis Based on the Court Database

• In Event: Emerging Voices in Chinese Criminology, Sponsored by ACCCJ and ACS

Abstract

Legal scholars have long focused on the importance of rigorous empirical research in law. Recently, a growing number of countries around the world began to digitize their court records and made them publicly available. In this research, we introduce the Macau Sentencing Database (MSD) to encourage and promote the careful, dispassionate testing of the assumptions about the operation of the Macau legal system that many legal and policy debates hinge upon. Compared with just a few years ago, researchers today in Macau can gain electronic access to approximately 85% and 77% of all publicly available court documents in the Court of Second Instance and the Court of Final Appeal, respectively. In the pilot phase, we aim to achieve two objectives. First, we construct the MSD by performing digitization of the 6% existing court case documents (n=16,929) into variables related to defendant and plaintiff characteristics (e.g. Gender, Employment status, Marital status, ID type, Place of Birth, Education), case details (Date, Disposition, Length of sentence, Type of offense) and judge details(e.g. Gender, Age, Nationality). Second, we perform Know-how for Empirical Legal Studies Data Analytics on these existing cases to provide evidence about the functioning of courts and the legal systems.

Author

• Yiwei Song, University of Nevada, Las Vegas