by Jo Ellen Nott

On September 27, 2022, Alachua County in north central Florida made history by funding equitable sentencing software for Florida’s Eighth Judicial Circuit.  This makes the Eighth the first Florida judicial circuit to take an historic step forward to improve its case management system and plea-bargaining process.  

Public Defender Stacy Scott and Eighth Circuit State Attorney Brian Kramer joined forces to present the new software to Alachua County commissioners on August 2, 2022. Both saw the need for more parity in a criminal justice system where approximately 95 percent of cases are settled in plea negotiations, and the sentences given vary widely. 

The software began as the brainchild of long-time Jacksonville attorney Al Barlow, motivated by years of seeing unfair sentencing.  The Equity in Sentencing Analysis System (“ESAS”) gives attorneys a searchable database of statewide sentencing data from the Florida Department of Corrections going back to 1998. With the ESAS, legal eagles can analyze past sentences that defendants with similar criminal backgrounds have received for similar crimes.  

Barlow built his company, Technologies for Justice, after being rebuffed by the Florida Senate Judiciary Committee.  In 2017, the committee turned him down when he offered to give the software to the state in exchange for their providing a programmer to help him.  Barlow then formed a team with a finance executive and a technology partner to run an analysis of Florida’s sentencing guideline system. They discovered that the Criminal Punishment Code of 1998 does not produce fair sentencing across the Sunshine State.  The ESAS software is a valuable tool to audit those sentencings.   

“We feel like this is an important step forward in trying to create more parity in our criminal justice system so that there aren’t these disparate sentences that exist today,” public defender Scott said when she and Kramer presented the system to the county.

State Attorney Kramer told public radio that the database will give lawyers the mean, mode, and median of sentencing data.  Those data will enable the lawyer to compare his or her case and ask, “is my case less serious than average or more serious than average?”  The data will provide a starting point to develop a sentence that avoids inequities in the criminal justice system. 

Deployment of ESAS into the current system will cost Alachua County $73,000, followed by an annual subscription cost of roughly $23,000 for each office. 

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