OUR Projects
Resentencing Eligibility Determination
In 2023, we built a data science tool for the Three Strikes Project (TSP) at Stanford Law School to support Prosecutor-Initiated Resentencing (PIR) in the counties where TSP partners with district attorneys’ offices. The tool screens the prison population and identifies candidates suitable for second-look review under each office’s own eligibility criteria. It helped standardize the case review process and accelerated the implementation of PIR in those partnering counties.
Our separate Encouraging Second-Look Case Reviews initiative works from the defense side, generating candidate cohorts for every sentencing county in California and referring them to public defenders through the Office of the State Public Defender, where relief may proceed through PIR, Penal Code 1172.1, AB 600, or the Racial Justice Act.
he Three Strikes Project is a legal clinical seminar at Stanford Law School where students represent individuals serving life sentences for non-violent offenses under California’s Three Strikes law. TSP also works directly with district attorneys’ offices that have committed to reviewing past cases through PIR, helping them safely and effectively reduce sentences that no longer serve the interests of justice. With tens of thousands of people in CDCR custody, prosecutors need efficient and accurate ways to identify who meets their review criteria rather than combing through files manually. Redo.io’s open-source eligibility tool let TSP and its partner DA offices filter the caseload and focus attorney time on the cases that qualify.
How It Works
This project served the prosecution side of resentencing: candidates were identified for district attorneys’ offices in TSP’s partner counties, using criteria those offices established for PIR.
What it is:
- A deterministic model with a rules-based framework designed by legal experts
- Easily interpretable and explainable for non-technical users and audience
- Responsive to user requests, i.e. an attorney can request changes to the eligibility criteria and see updated results
What it is not:
- A black box predictive model
- A decision-maker that determines the cases that are ultimately resentenced by the courts
Step by Step
Execution
- Ingest the demographics, current offenses and prior offenses of individuals in California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) custody
- Run the eligibility model (with selection criteria and scenarios designed by legal experts)
- Return a cohort of individuals eligible for PIR
- Provide attorneys easy-to-understand personal profiles of each candidate
- Re-run the eligibility model when new data on the prison population is released
Developers
Access code and raw data
The original rules-based eligibility model built for the Three Strikes Project.
The modular successor framework that generalizes cohort building beyond PIR.
Citation
APA style:
Redo.io. (2023). Resentencing Eligibility Model (Version 1.0.0) [Computer software]. https://github.com/redoio/resentencing_data_initiative
BibTex:
@software{redoio_model_2023,
author = {{Redo.io}},
title = {{Resentencing Eligibility Model}},
url = {https://github.com/redoio/resentencing_data_initiative},
version = {1.0.0},
year = {2023}}
