CourtTracker™ is an ensemble of research and informational tools related to Wisconsin circuit court data, including case assignments, dispositions, and court calendars. CourtTracker was developed specifically for the needs of criminal defense attorneys, but is also used by researchers, government officials, and others. The CourtTracker toolset is a service of Court Data Technologies LLC, a small and focused consulting group in Madison, Wisconsin.
In her 2005 State of the Judiciary address, Chief Justice Shirley S. Abrahamson noted the difficulties of building a decision making process in sentencing that accounts for individual variables while offering some degree of predictability and uniformity.
While Truth-In-Sentencing and sentencing guidelines have moved the state courts toward consistency and uniformity in recent years, these were never intended to replace the court's traditional exercise of discretion, and individual criminal cases still receive unique and sometimes significantly different treatment.
Experienced criminal defense attorneys know Wisconsin law and the nuances of justice. They usually do an excellent job of amassing the details that support their cases. They take depositions, propound interrogatories, investigate and corroborate details, and ferret out witnesses.
Paradoxically, when it comes to sentencing and plea agreements, counsel too often relies on limited personal memory of analogous cases. Depending on the commonness of the charge and familiarity with the prosecutor, judge, and other factors, this reliance can be misplaced and a detriment to the client’s defense.
Court Data Technologies provides facts for criminal defense preparation. Using innovative technology, we have built sophisticated scripts and programming to query circuit court criminal data in ways that no one else can. For attorneys, this means access to a wealth of information and the ability to explore criminal case data in search of patterns and systematic relationships.
Now, using the CourtTracker™ web research tool, defense attorneys have a fast and simple means to know with certainty what has transpired in selected sets of Wisconsin circuit court criminal cases.
Specific details regarding each circuit court case are available publicly on the Wisconsin CCAP web site. Many attorneys have used CCAP for research in the past, and are aware of the limitations of CCAP as a research tool.
CourtTracker™ has the same raw data as CCAP, but has more versatile and powerful searches, useful sorting, and ingenious features designed for criminal defense research. CourtTracker™ will find the case data that attorneys need and present the details in a format that attorneys can use.
CourtTracker is simple and fast: Log onto a website, click on a few selection fields, and within seconds the results of your query are in front of you. If you need more/ less/ different data, the query can be changed with a few more clicks, and new results are displayed.
CourtTracker extends the utility of the CCAP data as a resource for defense counsel.
CourtTracker was built for attorneys. CCAP was built for the courts.
• Verifiable case data from CCAP including criminal misdemeanor, felony, and traffic cases dating back over 10 years.
• Easy to use and available at all times via the Web.
• Search on counties, statutes, prosecutors, defendant demographics, and much more.
• See the relevant case detail, dispositions, and sentences within seconds.
• Find similar cases, identify trends and patterns, discover exceptions.
• CourtTracker provides a compendious history of past cases to better predict future court actions.
CourtTracker is offered by annual subscription per firm WITH UNLIMITED SEARCHES. The price is very reasonable and depends on the size of the firm, and number and type of criminal cases represented annually.
Call us at (608) 442-0600 to learn more.