Jusletter IT

Punishment extraction from Dutch criminal cases in courts of first instance

  • Authors: Edwin Wenink / Johan Kwisthout / Tom van Engers
  • Category of articles: AI & Law
  • Region: Netherlands
  • Field of law: AI & Law
  • Collection: Conference proceedings IRIS 2023
  • DOI: 10.38023/4e70922a-cf3f-4c81-9f37-c4ea37e2674d
  • Citation: Edwin Wenink / Johan Kwisthout / Tom van Engers, Punishment extraction from Dutch criminal cases in courts of first instance, in: Jusletter IT 30 March 2023
This paper explores the merits of a pattern- and rule-based approach for the automated extraction of punishments from Dutch criminal cases in courts of first instance. Automated extraction of case outcomes leverages the increasing amount of information becoming available through digital technologies and aids the creation of big data sets for work in legal informatics and AI & Law. This work addresses domain-specific challenges, in particular that Dutch criminal case decisions may impose a single combined sentence for multiple facts or impose multiple sentences in the same decision. Manual evaluation of the developed method shows that the use of interpretable methods is a viable approach in the legal domain.

Table of contents

  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Background
  • 2.1. Defining criminal case outcomes
  • 3. Methods
  • 3.1. Data set
  • 3.2. Detecting case sentences using regular expressions and rules
  • 3.3. Selection bias
  • 3.4. From sentences to labels
  • 4. Results
  • 4.1. Performance metrics
  • 4.2. Punishment vector statistics
  • 5. Discussion and Conclusion
  • 6. References

No comments

There are no comments yet

Ihr Kommentar zu diesem Beitrag

AbonnentInnen dieser Zeitschrift können sich an der Diskussion beteiligen. Bitte loggen Sie sich ein, um Kommentare verfassen zu können.