ABOUT

The Corporate Prosecution Registry is a joint project of the Legal Data Lab at the University of Virginia School of Law and Duke University School of Law. The goal of this Corporate Prosecution Registry is to provide comprehensive and up-to-date information on federal organizational prosecutions in the United States, so that we can better understand how corporate prosecutions are brought and resolved. We include detailed information about every federal organizational prosecution since 2001, as well as deferred and non-prosecution agreements with organizations since 1990.

We aim to provide accurate, timely, and accessible information for policymakers, researchers and litigators alike. All of the information contained on this website is publicly available, and was gathered from federal docket sheets, press releases, prosecutor’s offices, as well as from FOIA requests.

The Registry was created by Professor Brandon Garrett ( bgarrett@law.duke.edu) and Jon Ashley ( ashleyj@darden.virginia.edu)). We welcome any questions or feedback about the contents or features of this website. Please tell us if you notice any errors or can add information about a case, or if you have information about a case that is missing from the Registry.

We want to encourage the broadest possible use of this data for research and educational purposes. We believe all of the primary documents collected here are works of the United States government and are therefore free of all copyright protection, per Section 105 of the U.S. Copyright Act. To promote access and reuse of the database, which may be subject to limited copyright protection or other legal protections, we have licensed the data for free public use under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Please attribute the database as indicated above. For permission to make commercial uses not covered by the license or a relevant legal provision (such as fair use), please contact us.

Please cite to this resource collection as:

Brandon L. Garrett and Jon Ashley, Corporate Prosecution Registry, Duke University and Univ. of Virginia Darden School of Business, at http://lib.law.virginia.edu/Garrett/corporate-prosecution-registry/index.html

USING THE REGISTRY

The cases, as indicated below, may be displayed by name of entity, prosecuting office (with multiple offices listed where applicable), jurisdiction, date, whether the case was resolved through a plea agreement, a deferred prosecution agreement, or a non-prosecution agreement, whether the company was public or not, and whether it was foreign or domestic. The cases can be sorted along a range of other dimensions as well using the advanced search box.

In addition, if one clicks on a case, one can see a detailed view with information just about that corporate prosecution. If one clicks on the crime, say fraud, then one can obtain a list of all corporations prosecuted for fraud. If one clicks on the penalty, then one can obtain a list of all companies sorted by size of penalty. Penalties are themselves broken down by type of payment. A glossary, below, defines the relevant terms used.

PDFs of documents are also included for each case. For convicted companies, docket sheets are included. The dockets are unofficial and may be incomplete or out-of-date. The official dockets are available on PACER (fees may apply). For convicted companies, where available, plea agreements are also included.

For deferred and non-prosecution agreements, the agreements themselves are attached, where available. Companion civil regulatory agreements are also attached, where available.

We do not treat as a separate “case” a deferred prosecution or non-prosecution agreement that additionally names a subsidiary, unless prosecutors entered a separate agreement with the subsidiary. That is why some cases include several entities as part of the company name. However, plea agreements, in contrast to deferred prosecution and non-prosecution agreements, sometimes formally include a separate conviction and agreement with the subsidiary, and where that occurs, the companion cases are listed separately.

These data on deferred prosecution and non-prosecution agreements were collected by identifying agreements through news searches, press releases by the Department of Justice and U.S. Attorney’s Office, and also when practitioners brought agreements to our attention. The Government Accountability Office conducted a study of federal deferred prosecution and non-prosecution agreements with organizations, and in August 2010, the GAO provided a list of those agreements in response to an information request. Finally, searches of the Bloomberg dockets database located additional prosecution agreements with companies that had not previously been located. Jon Ashley has contacted U.S. Attorney’s Offices to request agreements. An effort by the First Amendment Clinic at the University of Virginia School of Law to litigate Freedom of Information Act requests resulted in locating a group of missing agreements which are now available on the Registry.

This Registry only includes information about federal organizational prosecutions, and not cases brought solely in state courts. Nor does this Registry include leniency agreements entered through the Antitrust Division’s leniency program, which are kept confidential.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission reports sentencing data concerning organizational prosecutions each year. That data does not include cases resolved without a formal sentencing, such as deferred and non-prosecution agreements. The Commission’s sourcebooks can be read here.

PEOPLE