The Process and Difficulties of Coding the Twenty-Year Old 1998 U.S. Embassy Bombings Case Sara Godfrey On August 7th, 1998, trucks armed with explosives simultaneously detonated outside U.S. embassies in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya, bringing public attention for many to al-Qaeda for the first time. The explosions killed 224 people and injured […]
Freedom of Information Act or Freedom to Pay for Information Act? Morgan Demboski When researching cases for the project, court documents are the jackpot of source files. I always feel a tiny bit of excitement when I am able to find a free indictment or plea document online. However, I think my excitement stems from […]
Secondary Sources – Can They Be More Useful Than Primary Sources? Margaret Kolozsvary For the work that we do at The Prosecution Project, it is crucial that we have an abundance of sources that we can turn to when we are looking for additional cases to add to our growing database. While we can use […]
Source Files for Older Cases: Luck or Skill? Katherine Coate Finding accurate source files is an integral part of coding cases because it is how we find the information to correctly fill in variables. Some cases, especially more well-known cases, are easy to find, but others, especially older cases, take a lot of digging and […]
Future Considerations: Relationship to the Group Variable Nitya Sunil Salman Rashid was arrested for contacting a confidential human source who he assumed was a member of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. The Department of Justice stated that Rashid wanted to instruct members of ISIS to conduct an attack on his behalf […]
Who and What Defines Terrorism? & How Much Trust Do We Put Into Our Sources?: The issue of subjectivity and credibility when defining and coding terrorism Catie Barry Of the many challenges posed when doing team-based research, consistency in coding and the process is essential when doing qualitative coding. To have a consistent method of […]
When a Defendant is Charged at both the Federal Level & State Level Izzy Bielamowicz Although it is not a common occurrence in practice, there are a handful of cases within tPP’s dataset which fall under the jurisdiction of both the federal government and the state government. In these cases, a defendant has been charged […]
An Update on Updating Cases: The Success of the tPP Updates Calendar Sara Godfrey During the Spring 2020 term, two students and I began tackling tPP’s backlog of over 650 cases waiting for updates. To do this in an organized and systematic fashion, a team calendar was created to track sentencing dates. Over the summer, […]
The One Where the Defendant is Already Serving a Life Sentence Izzy Bielamowicz One of the more confusing cases that I have studied and coded in my time with tPP is the ‘Fleurinord’ group case, which I completed with my partner earlier this semester. This particular case includes three defendants: Hitler Fleurinord, Billy Alexander, and […]
COVID-19’s Effects on Crime Reporting and Case Management Catie Barry With millions of people out of work due to government-mandated stay-at-home orders, it leaves the streets seemingly much more riddled with crime. With websites such as Time, Forbes and PBS reporting a significant decrease in crime due to the pandemic, it leaves the public believing […]