Media Release
Embargoed until 11:00 AM AEDT Thursday 23 October 2014
The Sentencing Advisory Council today upgraded SACStat, its online statistical tool, to include data on offences sentenced in the Supreme and County Courts. SACStat will now provide sentencing data on over 700 offences. This data is freely available to the public through the Council’s website.
The SACStat – Higher Courts module adds to the existing SACStat – Magistrates’ Court module. The new module contains aggregate sentencing data from the Supreme and County Courts of Victoria for the period July 2008 to June 2013.
Six-Fold Increase in Offences Covered
The new module expands and updates data published in the Council’s long-running Sentencing Snapshots series, which has covered (and will continue to cover) 31 offences sentenced in the higher courts. SACStat – Higher Courts increases the coverage to almost 200 offences.
Offences of Community Concern
SACStat – Higher Courts makes available for the first time sentencing data on offences that have caused the community considerable concern, including:
- dangerous driving causing death
- causing serious injury negligently
- defensive homicide
- attempted murder
- kidnapping
- failure to provide and maintain a safe working environment.
New Features
Other new features of SACStat – Higher Courts include:
- ‘tile’ graphs – grids showing combinations of total effective imprisonment terms and non-parole periods for cases that received imprisonment
- summary statistics for key sentence measurements, including minimum, maximum and median imprisonment terms, and other ways to summarise and display the data
- a user guide.
Both modules allow users to display sentencing data according to the age and gender of the offender, as well as sentencing by charge and by case.
SACStat - Magistrates’ Court has also been updated to cover a three-year period to June 2014.
Council CEO Cynthia Marwood said, 'The new data available on SACStat will greatly assist judges, magistrates, legal practitioners, journalists and academics in their work and will also help the community in understanding current sentencing practices.'
SACStat is accessible via the Council's website.
