  Open data promotes transparency and accountability as everyone can analyse
it. Law enforcement and the judiciary are increasingly making data available,
to increase trust and confidence in the criminal justice system. Due to privacy
legislation, judicial open data -- like court judgments -- in Europe is usually
anonymised. Because this removes part of the information on for instance
offenders, the question arises to what extent criminological research into
sentencing can make use of anonymised open data. We answer this question based
on a case study in which we use the open data of the Dutch criminal justice
system that rechtspraak.nl/Uitspraken makes available. Over the period
2015-2020, we analysed sentencing in 25,366 court judgments and, in particular,
investigated the relationship between sentence severity and the offender's use
of advanced ICT -- as this is information that is readily available in open
data.
  The most important results are, firstly, that offenders who use advanced ICT
are sentenced to longer custodial sentences compared to other offenders.
Second, our results show that the quality of sentencing research with open data
is comparable to the quality of sentencing research with judicial databases,
which are not anonymised.
