March 31, 2017, 12:28 p.m. | bgarrett
For almost a decade, we have been gathering data on corporate prosecutions. Those efforts have resulted now in the creation of The Corporate Prosecution Registry, a project of the University of Virginia School of Law. The goal of this 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. For some time now we have been gathering detailed information about federal organizational prosecution since 2000, as well as deferred and non-prosecution agreements with organizations since 1990. Thousands of those plea agreements and deferred prosecution agreements and non-prosecution agreements with corporations have been available on our UVA resource websites for years now. We have been thrilled to see lawyers, regulators, judges and researchers put that material to use. Our goal in revamping the websites to create a single Registry was to provide a more powerful tool to analyze corporate crime enforcement. What can this tool do? Each of these corporate prosecutions can now be sorted across a spectrum of characteristics. You can pull the cases with just certain types of crimes: just the foreign bribery cases or just the cases involving securities fraud or just the cases involving the environment. Or you can pull just certain types of resolutions, and study just the non-prosecution agreements or just the plea agreements. Or you can look at cases with fines of a certain size. Or just corporate prosecutions involving firms from a certain county. You can look at just the public companies that have been prosecuted. All of this data is also available for download as a spreadsheet. All of the information contained on this Registry is publicly available. We gathered information, with the help of many talented research assistants over the years, from federal docket sheets, press releases, prosecutor’s offices, as well as from FOIA requests. Our goal is to provide accurate, timely, and accessible information for policymakers, researchers and litigators alike. We hope you make use of and enjoy this new tool. And if you uncover errors or find cases that we should have included, or have suggestions for new functions that we could add—please let us know. This Registry was a long time in coming but it remains a work in progress. We will continue to update it and we hope to continue to improve it. Because the plea agreements on this Registry are primarily obtained through searches of federal docket sheets, these data are typically about six months out of date. We are currently still locating additional 2016 guilty pleas finalized with organizations, although we are well into 2017. It is a constantly ongoing process. The Registry was created by Professor Brandon Garrett (bgarrett@virginia.edu) and Jon Ashley (jonashley@law.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. Please cite to this resource collection as: Brandon L. Garrett and Jon Ashley, Corporate Prosecutions Registry, University of Virginia School of Law, at http://lib.law.virginia.edu/Garrett/corporate-prosecution-registry/