How Childhood Experiences Shape Belief Systems: Psychology behind the Ritchie case Megan Roques (@meganroques) When coding cases, we examine multiple cases with various motivations in order to determine if they fit the inclusion criteria. Lately, most of the cases that I have found have been the result of scraping documents and databases. Therefore, coding these […]
Deportation Station: What Makes a Guilty Defendant More Likely to be Deported? Zoe Belford This is a brief summary of a 14-week research project I designed and carried out, assessing what conditions lead to an increased likelihood of deportation following a guilty verdict in a United States terrorism prosecution, as well as if and how […]
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 […]
Gender Disparities in Crimes of Political Violence: Revealing tPP’s Strengths and Limitations Kayla Groneck Taking a step back from coding further cases for the dataset, tPP’s researchers wanted to take the time to answer some of the questions which had arisen around the trends we identified over months of researching and coding prosecutions of political […]
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 […]