Legal Information Institute

Client

Thomas R. Bruce, Director Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School
Email: <tom@liicornell.org>

The Legal Information Institute (LII) is the single most visible web site at Cornell. In past years, several successful CS 5150 projects have developed software for the LII.

Background

The New York Prosecutors Training Institute is a not-for-profit corporation that provides education, training, advice, and assistance to New York State prosecutors. NYPTI’s attorneys research and write briefs, answer motions, and help draft memoranda on virtually any criminal law topic.

As part of its activities, NYPTI operates a software-based expert system called CrimeTime, which calculates permissible sentences for New York crimes, taking into account the crime, defendant's age, and criminal history. Originally developed by a Cornell law alumnus (and Tompkins County DA ), George Dentes, CrimeTime became a NYPTI service upon his death in 2006. It is widely used by prosecutors and attorneys defending criminal clients, and is considered a national model for systems of its type. It uses a complex database of rules, modifiers, and linked explanatory text to arrive at and explain its results.

In addition to CrimeTime Online, NYPTI's public web site contains feeds from the New York State Law Reporting Bureau (making all recent appellate decisions available to the public); and also has a tool called NYSLaws – a mobile friendly web site that provides links to the full text statutes of the NYS Penal Law, Criminal Procedure Law, and selected provisions of Vehicle and Traffic Law – with pre-written searches that provide the latest New York State cases citing each provision of the law.

The Project

Redesign CrimeTime Online in a robust content management system that will make it more user friendly, incorporate and combine NYPTI’s other online publicly available tools (NYS Laws and NYS Decisions). An important part of this goal is to create interfaces that will allow a team of attorneys across New York State (NYPTI Attorneys, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and possibly law clerks and attorneys for the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision), to easily update new crimes and sentences as the law changes (which it frequently does). This tool will also allow team members to add new statutes to the NYS Laws collection.

Impact

Countless participants in NY’s criminal justice system depend on CrimeTime for quick and accurate sentencing information. CrimeTime is used by prosecutors, defense counsel, and judges, and is available to anyone else with a question about sentencing in New York State. For example, see this reference to CrimeTime from the Brooklyn Defender Services: http://www.bds.org/resources/links.aspx. By creating a user-friendly, free, public web site where any user can navigate the complicated world of New York criminal law; look up sentencing options; as well as read up-to-date New York Statutes and Case Law, this project has the potential to impact the lives of many.