SAG Research · Program 01 · Study protocol
Documented Accountability in Federal Sentencing
A proposed study of public written sentencing opinions, 2022–2025.
This document specifies a proposed design. The research lead, second coder and independent reviewers have not been appointed. No study corpus has been finalized, no reliability statistics have been calculated and no findings have been produced.
1. Question and intended contribution
How do federal district judges describe and evaluate documented accountability, rehabilitation, compliance changes and other mitigating evidence in publicly available written opinions explaining initial sentencing decisions?
The study will distinguish the claims made by parties, the supporting material described in the opinion and the court’s own assessment. Secondary questions concern the timing of conduct, corroboration, sustained change, victim-related considerations and reasons the court gives for crediting, questioning or rejecting an argument.
The intended contribution is a reproducible description of judicial reasoning in a defined public-opinion corpus. The study will not measure whether SAG services work, infer a defendant’s inner sincerity, rank judges or predict an individual’s sentence.
2. Sources, coverage and eligibility
Primary frame: GovInfo’s United States Courts Opinions collection, restricted to federal district-court opinions dated January 1, 2022 through December 31, 2025. GovInfo states that the collection covers selected courts. Availability varies; the collection is not a complete record of federal sentences.
Supplemental sources: Official court websites may help verify or supplement documents. Any supplementary cases must be logged separately, with their retrieval method, and analyzed separately before any combined description. Do not silently mix a targeted collection with a systematic primary frame.
- Include: written judicial opinions or orders with substantive reasons for an initial federal criminal sentence imposed on an individual. Include favorable, unfavorable and mixed evaluations, as well as eligible opinions with no discussion of the target concepts.
- Exclude: party sentencing memoranda, press releases, civil and bankruptcy matters, organizational defendants, appellate opinions, procedural entries without sentencing reasoning, and orders addressing only resentencing, compassionate release, sentence modification or collateral review. Log an exclusion reason.
- Unit of analysis: one defendant’s initial sentencing decision. Link multiple opinions concerning that decision under one decision ID. Treat a multi-defendant opinion as multiple units only where reasoning can be attributed separately; otherwise flag inseparable reasoning.
- Boundary: use opinion date for retrieval eligibility and record the sentence date separately where stated. Do not substitute one date for the other.
The first study covers offense categories represented in the eligible corpus; it is not restricted to white-collar cases. An economic-offense subgroup may be described only after a source-grounded definition and coding rule are fixed.
3. Retrieval and sample construction
Begin with a feasibility inventory of the available district-court criminal opinions in the date window. Seek a broad metadata-based frame. If full screening is infeasible and text queries are needed, publish the exact tested syntax and resulting coverage limits before full coding.
Draft retrieval concepts are sentenc*, 3553 and variance. These are concepts to validate against the source interface, not a claim that searches have been run. Do not require “rehabilitation,” “remorse” or “accountability” as entry criteria: that would exclude decisions that do not discuss them.
- Log source, exact query and filters, retrieval date, result count, document identifier, URL, opinion date and court.
- Remove exact duplicates and link related opinions before counting eligible sentencing decisions. Retain a record of exclusions and unresolved retrieval failures.
- Pilot the draft codebook on 24 eligible decisions spanning years and, where available, multiple courts and offense categories. This is a design pilot, not a representative sample. Mark pilot records and exclude them from confirmatory summaries unless version 1.0 specifies complete recoding under the frozen rules.
- After the feasibility review, publish protocol version 1.0 with the retrieval cutoff, enumerated frame, sampling method, target size and rationale, strata, random seed if applicable, and analysis plan. Prefer a census of the enumerated eligible frame when feasible; otherwise use reproducible probability sampling within that frame.
- Freeze the frame and codebook before full coding. Any later additions or rule changes must be versioned and reported.
Even a random sample from this frame represents the frame—not all federal sentencing decisions. No national prevalence estimate will be presented on the strength of this opinion sample alone.
4. Draft codebook
Code only what the opinion supports. Attach a page or paragraph reference to substantive classifications. Use “not stated,” “not applicable” and “ambiguous” as distinct values where relevant. Non-mention does not mean conduct or evidence did not exist.
| Field group | Proposed recording rule |
|---|---|
| Document & decision | Stable source ID, URL, court, opinion date, sentence date if stated, related documents and duplicate-decision flag. |
| Procedural context | Initial sentencing eligibility, offense description, applicable guideline range, mandatory minimum and criminal-history category only where expressly stated. |
| Whose statement? | Separate defendant or counsel argument, government position, probation material described by the court, and the court’s own evaluation. |
| Evidence domains | Responsibility and remorse; restitution or victim repair; treatment; employment and service; compliance or governance changes; family obligations; other rehabilitation. Permit multiple domains. |
| Support described | Assertion alone, identified document, described third-party evidence, longitudinal record, other support or unclear. These are evidence-description categories, not a validated quality score. |
| Timing & duration | Timing relative to investigation, charge, plea and sentencing where stated; reported duration or “not stated.” Do not infer dates. |
| Court evaluation | Expressly credited, questioned or discounted, rejected, mixed, mentioned without evaluation, not mentioned, or ambiguous. Record the supporting passage. |
| Reasons & competing considerations | Reasons stated by the judge, including offense seriousness, deterrence, victim impact, public safety and concerns about credibility or timing. Do not infer hidden motives. |
| Sentence & relationship | Sentence imposed and guideline comparison only where adequately stated. Record whether the court expressly connects an evidence domain to its decision. That connection is not a causal estimate. |
| Missingness & conflicts | Missing or unclear fields; source quality; known author, reviewer or SAG involvement in the matter. Do not disclose private engagement information to create a public dataset. |
5. Coding, disagreement and external review
Two human coders must independently code the pilot before discussing disagreements. Revise definitions, preserve the disagreement log and identify rules needing clarification. AI assistance must be disclosed and cannot count as the second coder.
For the main corpus, independently double-code a randomly selected 25% of decisions, with a minimum of 30 decisions, or the entire corpus if fewer than 30 are eligible. Select this subset before coding and stratify by year where feasible. Both coders must code it without access to each other’s classifications.
Report raw agreement, category counts and an appropriate chance-corrected agreement statistic for key categorical fields, with uncertainty where feasible, before adjudication. The methods reviewer must approve the final reliability measures and handling of sparse categories in version 1.0. Low agreement triggers clarification and recoding; it must not be hidden by reporting consensus agreement alone.
An independent federal sentencing legal reviewer will assess legal and procedural classifications. An independent methods reviewer will assess sampling, measurement and interpretation. Resolve disagreements through a recorded adjudication process and preserve both initial codes and the adjudicated result. Review must be completed before releasing a finished SAG Research Paper.
6. Analysis and release plan
The initial analysis will be descriptive: a retrieval and screening flow, counts by year and court, missingness by field, evidence categories, court-evaluation categories and carefully sourced examples of contrasting reasoning. Every percentage must identify its denominator. Report both decision counts and document counts where they differ.
Exploratory subgroup analyses must be labeled exploratory. Account for related decisions and repeated courts or judges when describing dependence. Do not present a simple correlation between a coded evidence category and sentence length as the effect of that evidence. Any modeling requires a separately reviewed, versioned analysis plan.
Use United States Sentencing Commission data only as separately identified context, with its own definitions and fiscal-year coverage. Do not assume its de-identified records can be matched to public cases or use it as a weight that makes this selected opinion corpus nationally representative.
Release the final protocol, codebook, source manifest, screening log, shareable coded data, analytic code, review statement, funding and conflict disclosure, limitations and corrections history with the report, subject to source rights and privacy constraints.
7. Limits that must accompany findings
- Selection into a written opinion and public availability may be associated with unusual, disputed or otherwise distinctive cases.
- Search language and repository coverage may omit relevant decisions, including reasoning delivered orally.
- Written opinions do not reveal the complete evidentiary record, confidential PSR content or every reason for a sentence.
- A reference to rehabilitation may reflect disputed claims; absence of a reference is not absence of rehabilitation.
- Offense seriousness, cooperation, guideline rules, counsel, timing and many other factors complicate outcome comparisons.
- Interpretive coding involves judgment. Reliability testing and external review reduce, but do not eliminate, that uncertainty.
No finding will establish that a proprietary SAG framework caused a sentence reduction. Broader normative recommendations will be separated from the descriptive findings on which they rely.
8. Ownership, disclosures and next gate
Initiative sponsor: Sentencing Advocacy Group. Founding lead: Joseph De Gregorio. Study research lead, second coder and external reviewers: pending appointment. SAG is a commercial advisory business; its founder has an economic interest in its services. Study-specific funding and in-kind contributions must be recorded before collection begins.
This draft was prepared with AI assistance at the founder’s direction and has not received independent legal or methods review. The next gate is the appointment of the research team, feasibility review and publication of protocol version 1.0. A completed study is not being announced.