TRAC documents “striking judge-to-judge differences” in federal criminal caseloads

This new release from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) reports on new research that “has found wide variations in the criminal caseloads of individual federal district court judges, in some instances even among the judges serving in the same courthouse.”  I doubt many federal practitioners will be surprised by this story, though some of the data is truly “striking”:

TRAC’s latest judge-by-judge analysis — using newly updated sentencing records on over 400,000 defendants — followed the criminal caseloads of 909 federal district court judges for the past 70 months…. Among the 909 district court judges whose records were examined, however, about half had not actively served during the entire 70-month study period. Thus, in the interest of better comparability, this report focuses on the 430 judges who had actively served for the entire 70 months….

[E]ven when the analysis was limited to the active judges who had served for the entire study period, the data disclosed surprising workload variations.  In ninety separate courthouses there were two or more active judges, allowing for a comparison of the variation in caseloads within the courthouse.  Among these ninety, there were four courthouses where the criminal caseload for one or more of the judges serving in them was twice the caseload of their colleague(s)….

There was also enormous variation in the volume of criminal cases a judge was required to handle that depended upon the courthouse at which the judge served.  While on average active judges sentenced 615 defendants during the study period, this average caseload level varied from a low of 147 criminal defendants in the District of Columbia federal court to a high of 7,020 in the Las Cruces, New Mexico district courthouse.