Northwestern University: Legal scholar’s new website offers a picture of the criminal justice system

Northwestern University: Legal scholar’s new website offers a picture of the criminal justice system. “Leigh Bienen, a senior lecturer at Northwestern Law, recently launched ‘2003 Chicago Murders,’ a compendium of numbers, system identifiers, dates and other information about 140 death-eligible murders in Cook County, all cases where an indictment for murder was returned during the period of Jan. 1, 2003, to June 30, 2003. The cases are divided into three subgroups based on the length of the sentence imposed. All of the data on the website, which comes from public records, includes names of the defendants and victims, defendants’ zip code and age at offense, method of killing and many more details. The data can be downloaded and analyzed by the user. “