Federal Sentencing Intelligence for Defender Offices
Move faster from case facts to sentencing strategy.
SentencingStats helps Defender teams evaluate plea decisions, develop mitigation, challenge PSRs and build sentencing advocacy with case-specific data and judicial intelligence—across the entire office.
Deployed in Federal Defender practice · Shaped with former Federal Defenders · Office-wide onboarding & support
High-Volume Federal Defense
More cases. More sentencing questions. Less time to research them.
Judge-specific sentencing questions
Finding comparable cases
PSR review and objections
Mitigation development
Federal Defender attorneys regularly move between these demands, often while managing substantial caseloads. SentencingStats turns sentencing data and court records into case-specific intelligence attorneys can use without rebuilding the research from scratch.
From fragmented inputs to actionable sentencing intelligence.
Raw Inputs
PSR sentencing data
Judicial transcripts
BOP capacity records
Guidelines & authorities
SentencingStats
AI-assisted analysis
& structured data
& structured data
Defender Outputs
Comparable cases
Judge patterns
Mitigation insights
Turnkey research
Mitigation Strategy
Turn sentencing data into mitigation strategy.
Mitigation begins with the client. SentencingStats helps attorneys and mitigation specialists add another layer: grounded evidence about comparable defendants, judicial reasoning, and actual sentencing outcomes.
The goal is not to replace mitigation investigation, but to strengthen it—helping teams identify what to investigate, what to emphasize, and what to support with data.
Client-Centered Mitigation
Client history
Family ties
Health / mental health
Offense circumstances
Rehabilitation
Sentencing Intelligence
Comparable defendants
Judge reasoning patterns
Variance behavior
Actual outcomes
Cases to cite
Case-Specific Mitigation Strategy
What to investigate
What to emphasize
What to support with data
From Plea Through Sentencing
Put sentencing intelligence to work at the decisions that matter.
Advising the Client on Sentencing Exposure
Before advising a client whether to plead or proceed to trial, counsel can examine actual historical outcomes for similarly situated defendants. Compare plea and trial sentencing distributions, sentencing exposure and relevant case characteristics rather than relying solely on the advisory Guidelines range.
Plea Cohort
View distribution
Trial Cohort
Compare outcomes
Evaluating Proposed Plea Terms
Compare proposed terms against actual sentencing outcomes of similarly situated defendants within the district U.S. Attorney’s Office. Compare plea outcomes in a variety of ways, including open pleas, binding plea agreements and non-binding plea agreements.
Open Pleas
Average Sentence
34 Mos.
Non-Binding
Average Sentence
30 Mos.
Binding Pleas
Average Sentence
22 Mos.
Testing the PSR's Sentencing Analysis
PSRs and government sentencing positions may rely on broad or poorly matched comparison data, including analyses drawn from tools such as JSIN. SentencingStats lets counsel test those assumptions against more precisely matched defendants and develop data-supported objections where the underlying comparison may be skewed.
PSR / JSIN Analysis
- • Broad comparison group
- • Limited case-specific filtering
Versus
SentencingStats
- Similarly situated defendants
- Case-specific exclusions
- True sentence distribution
Identify assumptions worth challenging
Anchoring the Sentencing Memorandum in Data
Bring together comparable sentences, mitigation patterns and judge-specific reasoning to support the sentencing memorandum and hearing. Where appropriate, a SentencingStats expert declaration can provide a methodology-backed statistical analysis that anchors key mitigation and sentencing-disparity arguments in the underlying data.
Mitigation Intelligence
Comparables + judge patterns
Expert Declaration
Methodology + statistical findings
Sentencing Memo
Data-anchored advocacy
Research. Analyze. Support the Advocacy.
Move from the research question to usable work product.
Query Prompt
"Which mitigating factors has this judge credited in comparable drug cases?"
Sentelligence Response
Age, minor role and family circumstances appear repeatedly in below-Guidelines sentencings.
Judicial Intelligence
Understand how your judge exercises discretion.
Analyze actual sentencing transcripts to identify patterns in mitigating factors, judicial reasoning, responses to counsel, and variance behavior. Build advocacy around the themes that have actually resonated with the court.
William L. Osteen, Jr.
Middle District of North Carolina
Factor Treatment
Age / Health (5H1.1)
Frequently Credited
Minor Role
Credited in multiple cases
Family Responsibilities
Mixed Treatment
Pattern From Prior Sentencings
Judge Osteen tends to establish a precise Guidelines baseline and then use §3553(a) variances to address disparities, minor roles or exceptional culpability. In Griffin, he refused to manipulate Guidelines calculations to engineer a “fair” result; in Thomas, he rejected the government’s extrapolated tax-loss figure for lack of concrete proof.
One Platform. Different Roles.
Built around the people doing the work.
Different roles working within a shared institutional intelligence environment.
Leadership
Federal Defender & Deputies
Provide consistent sentencing analytics across the office and manage institutional deployment, access and adoption.
Litigation
Assistant Federal Defenders
Move quickly from case facts to comparables, judge intelligence, sentencing research and case-specific advocacy.
Mitigation
Mitigation Specialists
Pair client-centered mitigation investigation with grounded statistical evidence and judicial reasoning patterns.
Support
Paralegals & Research
Identify comparator cases, organize intelligence, and reduce duplicative research work across attorneys.
SentencingStats
Enterprise Layer
Enterprise Layer
Shaped with Experience
Members of the SentencingStats Advisory Committee have helped shape the platform around Federal Defender needs.
Donna Elm
Former Federal Defender
Middle District of Florida
Middle District of Florida
Doug Passon
Former AFPD
District of Arizona
District of Arizona
Office-Wide Deployment
Turn individual tools into an office-wide capability.
The SentencingStats enterprise layer gives Federal Defender offices a centralized way to provide sentencing intelligence across attorneys and matters while managing users, access, case information and adoption.
Enterprise Administration
User Management
Centralized
Matter Management
Office-wide
Permissions
Role-based
Onboarding
Supported
Already deployed in Federal Defender practice.
SentencingStats is being deployed through a funded institutional engagement with a Federal Defender office, supporting attorney onboarding and active sentencing work.
From Pilot to Deployment
Start with a defined deployment. Expand as the office adopts it.
1
Configure the office
Establish users, access parameters, and initial priority use cases.
2
Onboard the team
Practical training for attorneys, mitigation specialists and support staff.
3
Expand with adoption
Scale access and usage across the organization as the platform proves its value.
Data-informed sentencing preparation
ABA Defense Function standards specifically call for counsel to understand the sentencing judge's practices and the normal pattern of sentences for the offense involved.
See ABA Criminal Justice Standards for the Defense Function, Std. 4-8.3; see also Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668, 688 (1984).
Effective assistance of counsel →Bring actionable sentencing intelligence across your office.
See how SentencingStats can help attorneys and mitigation teams move more quickly from case facts and sentencing data to research, strategy and advocacy.