Michigan Supreme Court begins work to create dashboard to increase transparency
LANSING, Mich. (CBS DETROIT) - The Michigan Supreme Court is beginning work to enhance transparency in felony sentencing across the state.
The highest court in Michigan announced this week it will create a new dashboard available to the public that will showcase the felony sentences handed down by judges across the state.
"The idea behind the dashboard is to create transparency in felony sentencing," said Tom Boyd, the state court administrator within the Michigan Supreme Court. "It's a way that folks at home could slice and dice the data the way that they want so they could compare different judges in how they sentence in felony cases."
The dashboard will allow people to look at criteria like race, gender and age.
"This is all in the Supreme Court's effort to dramatically increase transparency," Boyd said. "At the Supreme Court, we're mindful of the fact that we're the branch of government that doesn't have a big checkbook or police cars with jails. And so, our currency in society is the trust and confidence that people have in the courts."
The idea for this new dashboard came out of work from the Citizens for Racial Equity in Washtenaw, also called CREW which noted a circuit court judge was giving longer sentences depending on race.
Boyd tells CBS News Detroit that the Michigan Supreme Court did not find evidence of bias.
Members of CREW did not respond to an interview request on Thursday.
"That group, very smart, very well-intentioned folks, really didn't have access to the same kind of data that we have access to. And so it was with the seed of their report as the idea for going forward," Boyd said.
It will be a little while before Michiganders can pull up this data on the dashboard-- Boyd said it could be a year and a half to two years from now before it's up and running.
