Ministry of Justice praised for opening up court data

The 1.2m records released this week are an unprecedented exercise in open data, especially for a courts system long accused of operating a Victorian method of closed information. The database shows sentencing in 322 magistrates and crown courts in England and Wales. Defendants' names are excluded but details such as age, ethnicity, type of offence and sentence are not. Any computer user can analyse aspects such as how many white people were sent to jail for driving offences. "Open justice is a longstanding and fundamental principle of our legal system. Justice must be done and must be seen to be done if it is to command public confidence," said the justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke. The coalition government has pursued a transparency agenda, publishing previously secret items such as the Treasury's spending database, senior civil service salaries, public spending over £25,000, detailed local government spending figures and police crime maps. Traditionally, court reporters have had access to individual records, but only printed court listings for a given day. Names, ages and even addresses of defendants amount to public information under the law, except in youth cases where identity is protected. The Guardian's Reading the Riots study is based on magistrates court data, forming the basis of a report with the London School of Economics. Transparency campaigner William Perrin, who advises the Ministry of Justice on opening up its data, says the release is a big step: "Publishing the details of each sentence handed down in each court is a great leap forward for transparency in the UK, for which MoJ should be warmly praised. Courts have to be accountable to the local populations they serve." But he, like some campaigners, believes the MoJ should go further, releasing the names of defendants. "The data published is anonymised, flying in the face of hundreds of years of tradition of open courts and public justice. "The MoJ need to have an open and public debate about the conflict between the central role in our society of open public courts where you can hear the name and details of offenders read out in public and crude misapplication of data protection." Download the data • DATA: download the full spreadsheet from the Ministry of Justice More open data Data journalism and data visualisations from the Guardian World government data • Search the world's government data with our gateway Development and aid data • Search the world's global development data with our gateway Can you do something with this data? • Flickr Please post your visualisations and mash-ups on our Flickr group • Contact us at [email protected] • Get the A-Z of data • More at the Datastore directory • Follow us on Twitter • Like us on Facebook