Criminal Law: Web Resources

We are a not-for-profit group that believes everyone should be able to read and understand the laws that govern them, without cost. We carry out this vision by:

• Publishing law online, for free.


• Creating materials that help people understand law.


• Exploring new technologies that make it easier for people to find the law.

Oyez (pronounced oh-yay), a free law project at Chicago-Kent, is a multimedia archive devoted to making the Supreme Court of the United States accessible to everyone. It is a complete and authoritative source for all of the Court’s audio since the installation of a recording system in October 1955. Oyez exclusively offers transcript-synchronized and searchable audio, plain-English case summaries, illustrated decision information, and opinions. Oyez also provides detailed information on every justice throughout history and offers a panoramic tour of the Supreme Court building, including the chambers of several justices.

The Death Penalty Information Center is a national non-profit organization serving the media and the public with analysis and information on issues concerning capital punishment. Founded in 1990, the Center promotes informed discussion of the death penalty by preparing in-depth reports, conducting briefings for journalists, and serving as a resource to those working on this issue. The Center releases an annual report on the death penalty, highlighting significant developments and featuring the latest statistics. The Center also produces groundbreaking reports on various issues related to the death penalty such as arbitrariness, costs, innocence, and race.

The Registry collects, analyzes and disseminates information about all known exonerations of innocent criminal defendants in the United States, from 1989 to the present. We publish their stories and we provide accessible, searchable online statistical data about their cases. We also conduct empirical studies of the process of exoneration and of factors that lead to the underlying wrongful convictions.

BJS archives data files, documents them, and makes them available through the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data.

Data files that are maintained by NACJD are available for downloading from the Internet at no charge. For information about contacting NACJD, see Datasets and Codebooks on How to Find BJS products.

The central mission of NACJD is to facilitate and encourage research in the field of criminal justice through the sharing of data resources. NACJD provides--

Computer-readable data for the quantitative study of crime and the criminal justice system
Technical assistance in selecting data collections and the computer hardware and software for analyzing data efficiently and effectively
Training in quantitative methods of social science research to facilitate secondary analysis of criminal justice data
NACJD routinely receives statistical data from four U.S. Department of Justice agencies:

Bureau of Justice Statistics
National Institute of Justice,
Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention
Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program has been the starting place for law enforcement executives, students of criminal justice, researchers, members of the media, and the public at large seeking information on crime in the nation. The program was conceived in 1929 by the International Association of Chiefs of Police to meet the need for reliable uniform crime statistics for the nation. In 1930, the FBI was tasked with collecting, publishing, and archiving those statistics.

The mission of the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD) is to facilitate research in criminal justice and criminology, through the preservation, enhancement, and sharing of computerized data resources; through the production of original research based on archived data; and through specialized training workshops in quantitative analysis of crime and justice data.