Judgment coding, 1,860 published judgments, five courts

Legal research poster example

Sentence length for one offence category across five courts, laid out as an A0 landscape board with the table given the widest block on the design. Empirical legal work is read through its table, so the table is placed where the eye lands first.

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Nine months apart: sentence length for one offence category across five courts, 1,860 judgments

S. Kaufmann ¹, B. Ntuli ¹

1 School of Law, Redhaven University

Abstract

Sentencing consistency is asserted in appellate judgments and rarely measured. We coded 1,860 published first instance judgments for one offence category across five courts between 2020 and 2025. Median custodial length runs from 14 months at the lowest court to 23 at the highest, a spread of nine months that survives controlling for the aggravating factors recorded in the judgments themselves.

METHODS

Sample. 1,860 published first instance judgments, one offence category, five courts, 2020 to 2025.

Coding. Seven aggravating and five mitigating factors defined before coding, applied by two coders.

Agreement. All judgments double coded; agreement 0.89 on aggravating factors and 0.84 on mitigating.

Outcome. Head sentence in months of custody, non parole period recorded separately and not modelled.

Limits. Publication rate varies from 61% to 88% by court; unpublished sentences cannot be seen.

Median months by court

Court	Judgments	Median months	Interquartile range	Weapon involved
Ashvale	410	14	9 to 21	22%
Brightmoor	366	16	11 to 24	26%
Cranleigh	398	18	12 to 27	24%
Denholm	342	21	15 to 30	29%
Eastcote	344	23	16 to 33	27%
Caption (optional)

Design and the coding problem

Every study of sentencing spread runs into the same objection: courts differ because the cases differ. The usual answer is to control for whatever the dataset records, which in most sentencing datasets is the offence code, a prior record flag and the plea. That is far less than a judge sees. The published judgment is a better source, because it states in prose what the judge treated as aggravating and mitigating, and it does so in the judge own words rather than in an administrative category. We therefore coded the reasons rather than the record. Two coders read every judgment and marked seven aggravating factors and five mitigating ones defined before coding began, along with plea, prior convictions and whether the offence involved a weapon. The cost of that approach is the sample: only judgments that are published can be coded, and the publication rate varies by court, from 61% at the busiest court to 88% at the smallest. That is the single largest threat to the comparison and it is reported here rather than buried, because a court that publishes fewer of its shorter sentences would look harsher than it is.

REFERENCES

1.Ntuli, B. and Kaufmann, S. (2025) Coding reasons rather than records in sentencing research. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 29(2), 244 to 271.

2.Farrow, D. (2024) Publication selection and the measurement of sentencing spread. Criminal Law Review Quarterly, 46(3), 188 to 210.

3.Villanueva, M. (2026) Small benches and local sentencing culture. Redhaven Law Working Paper 2026-06.

Figure 1. Median head sentence in months (m) by court, in table order: A Ashvale to E Eastcote.

Source: published first instance judgments, 2020 to 2025.

Results

The five medians rise steadily rather than splitting into two groups, and the interquartile ranges overlap heavily: a sentence of 16 months would be unremarkable at any of the five. What differs is the middle of each distribution and the length of its upper tail. Eastcote passes 33 months or more in a quarter of its cases, against 21 months at Ashvale. The proportion of judgments recording a weapon runs from 22% to 29%, which is not enough spread to account for a nine month gap: reweighting every court to the pooled weapon rate moves the medians by at most one month and leaves the ordering unchanged. The same is true of plea, which is recorded in 78% to 84% of judgments across the five. Nor does time: splitting the six years into two halves moves every court median by at most two months and leaves Ashvale lowest and Eastcote highest in both halves.

9 months

between the lowest and highest court median

14 months at Ashvale against 23 at Eastcote, 1,860 judgments

What explains the spread

Three explanations remain after the recorded factors are controlled. The first is that the cases genuinely differ on something the judgments do not state, which cannot be tested with this design and is the reason the paper stops short of calling the spread inconsistency. The second is local sentencing culture: four of the five courts have three or fewer judges hearing this offence, and a single judge with a firm view moves a small court median a long way. The third is publication. A court that publishes 61% of its judgments is choosing which ones to publish, and if the shorter and more routine sentences are the ones left unpublished, the median reported here is too high for that court and too close to the others for comfort.

Medians run from 14 to 23 months across five courts

Interquartile ranges overlap; the tails do not

Weapon rate and plea rate do not explain the gap

Publication rate varies 61% to 88% and limits the claim

Block by block

What each block on the board is for, in the order a reader walks it.

Title band, two authors and a QR code: The title gives the finding and the corpus in one line: nine months apart, sentence length for one offence category across five courts, 1,860 judgments. Two authors share one school affiliation, with the QR code at the right.
Abstract: Sentencing consistency is asserted in appellate judgments and rarely measured. Median custodial length runs from 14 months at the lowest court to 23 at the highest, a nine month spread that survives controlling for the aggravating factors the judgments themselves record.
Methods as a labelled protocol: Five entries: the corpus of 1,860 published first instance judgments, a coding frame of seven aggravating and five mitigating factors defined before coding, double coding with agreement of 0.89 and 0.84, head sentence in months as the outcome, and the publication rate limit.
The results table: Five rows, one per court: Ashvale 410 judgments with a median of 14 months and an interquartile range of 9 to 21, through to Eastcote 344 judgments at 23 months with a range of 16 to 33. A weapon rate column runs 22% to 29%.
Figure and headline number: A bar chart repeats the five medians, keyed A to E in the caption so the axis labels stay short. Beside it a key number block reads nine months, labelled as the gap between the lowest and highest court median.
Design and the coding problem: A long block explaining why the judgments were coded rather than the administrative record: the published reasons state what the judge treated as aggravating in their own words. The cost is that only published judgments can be coded.
Results, what explains the spread, and references: The results block reports the overlapping ranges and the reweighting checks. The discussion leaves three explanations standing: genuine case differences, local sentencing culture on small benches, and publication selection. Four checked points and three references close the board.

What makes this board work

The table carries five courts and five columns

Court, judgment count, median, interquartile range and weapon rate, one row each. That is the whole comparison in a block a reader can check line by line, and it is why this layout gives the table the full width.

The confound is measured, not waved away

The weapon rate runs 22% to 29% across the five courts, and the results block states that reweighting to the pooled rate moves each median by at most a month. Naming the obvious objection and answering it with a number is what the table is for.

The limit is the headline of the discussion

Publication rates of 61% to 88% are stated in the methods, again in the discussion and again in the checked points. A study that can only see published judgments has to say so three times, because it is the reason to doubt the result.

Questions people ask

What goes on a legal research poster?

The legal question, the corpus and how it was selected, the coding frame and who applied it, the descriptive table, and the limits of the source. Empirical legal work usually rests on published judgments, so the publication rate belongs on the board rather than in a footnote.

Should a law poster carry a table or a chart?

Both, doing different jobs. The table here gives five courts their counts, medians, interquartile ranges and weapon rates; the chart shows the medians alone so the ordering reads from across the room. Do not repeat the same numbers in both and call it two pieces of evidence.

How do I keep a poster table readable at a metre?

Keep it to six rows and five columns, give the column headers the same size as body text, and let the table have the widest block on the board. Every cell is left aligned in this builder, so plan for that rather than expecting numeric columns to right align.

What type size should a law conference poster use?

Body text on this A0 landscape board is near 24 pixels on a 2340 by 1656 canvas, about 12 millimetres printed, which reads at a metre. Case citations and reference text can sit smaller because a reader steps in for them.

Can I print this at 300 DPI?

The export runs at twice the working canvas, so A0 landscape leaves at 4680 by 3312 pixels, roughly 100 DPI at full size. That is the working resolution for a board viewed from a metre. No bleed, crop marks or CMYK conversion are produced.

How do I adapt this to a different jurisdiction?

Retype the title, the abstract and the five method entries, then edit the table rows directly with your own courts and figures. The chart holds its own categories and values, so changing the number of courts is a data change rather than a layout change.

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Written and checked by the OneCraft team. Last checked 12 September 2026.