Frequently asked questions.

Yes — two products serve state-court practice today. Officer Lookup searches Florida FDLE/CJSTC certification discipline, Chicago CPD complaint records, Texas TCOLE certification + employment history, NYC CCRB complaint history, Georgia POST certification + employment history, Arizona AZPOST certification + employment history, and California POST + CDCR certification + employment history for the officers testifying against your client, with every row cited to the underlying public record — built for suppression motions, cross-exam prep, and disclosure requests. The search is a free preview; the full source-backed report for a named officer is $147. And the Jury Instruction Brief covers Florida state court: the verbatim Florida Standard Jury Instruction text for your charge — 25 charge families, from high-volume charges like DUI and driving-while-license-suspended through homicide, sex offenses, and economic crimes — with full adoption and amendment history, amendment-recency flags with reporter citations, and the Fla. R. Crim. P. 3.390 preservation rule — $97, checkout open on its page. Coverage expands jurisdiction by jurisdiction. Sentencing comparables remain federal-only: those products draw on the USSC datafile, and state sentencing data is not published in comparable form.

Officer data today: Chicago (CPD complaint records), Florida (FDLE/CJSTC certification discipline plus use-of-force incident rows), Texas (TCOLE peace-officer certification + employment history, obtained under the Texas Public Information Act and published via the National Police Index — certification history, not internal-affairs complaint files), New York City (NYPD civilian-complaint history from the CCRB database on NYC Open Data, public since the 2020 repeal of NY Civil Rights Law § 50-a — the published complaint/allegation record, not sealed or mediated complaints and not NYPD internal-affairs files), Georgia (GA POST peace-officer certification + employment history, public under the Georgia Open Records Act and published via the National Police Index — certification history, not internal-affairs complaint files), Arizona (AZPOST peace-officer certification + employment history, public under the Arizona Public Records Law and published via the National Police Index — certification history, not internal-affairs complaint files), and California (CA POST + CDCR peace-officer certification + employment history, public under the California Public Records Act and published via the National Police Index — certification history, not the per-agency SB 1421 / SB 16 personnel records or internal-affairs files), plus a national source-backed incident ledger — source-cited leads for attorney review, not Brady/Giglio conclusions. That is the current footprint — we do not claim full 50-state coverage, and jurisdiction-level depth expands one jurisdiction at a time. Federal sentencing products are nationwide because the USSC datafile is national. If your jurisdiction is not covered yet, join the waitlist and name it — coverage order follows demand.

The underlying records are public — that is the point. What the clerk's portal does not do is run one search across complaint datasets, certification-discipline exports, and use-of-force incident records, return the result in minutes instead of a records-request cycle, and cite every row to the source it came from so the output works as an exhibit foundation. If you have the hours to assemble that per officer per case, you do not need us. Most defense practices do not.

No. Westlaw and Lexis index case law and secondary sources — they do not answer "what is the complaint and discipline history of the officer testifying against my client?" Officer Lookup searches public officer-conduct records, not opinions. On the federal side, the sentencing products draw on the USSC datafile, which the legal-research platforms do not condition by charge and criminal-history the way a comparables brief requires. BenchRecon is a public-records exhibit tool, not a legal-research subscription.

If a brief you receive is not usable for plea or sentencing preparation — missing data, incorrect cell, formatting problems — reply to the delivery email within 7 days. We will correct the brief or refund the purchase. No questions asked.

Briefs require at least 10 comparable cases for a defensible distribution. If your cell is too rare — which happens in low-volume districts or unusual charge/history combinations — you will receive a same-day full refund. No charge to you. You can retry with a broader cell or a different district scope.

The primary source for the federal sentencing products is the U.S. Sentencing Commission annual individual-case datafile, which covers every federal case sentenced under the Guidelines since FY 1987 (ussc.gov/research/datafiles). The Sentencing Snapshot and JSIN Exclusion Brief draw exclusively from this datafile. The officer-record and jury-instruction products draw from their own public sources — Chicago CPD complaint records; NYC CCRB complaint history; Florida FDLE/CJSTC, Texas TCOLE, Georgia POST, Arizona AZPOST, and California POST + CDCR certification data; and the Florida Standard Jury Instructions — each row cited to the record it came from. CourtListener and FJC Integrated Database integrations will be cited in any future product where they are used, with the same data-source citation discipline.

No. The briefs are structured data exhibits — numbers, distributions, and verified citations drawn from public datasets. We do not use large language models to generate any text in the briefs. Every figure in the brief derives from a specific USSC datafile record and is labeled with the datafile vintage so opposing counsel or the court can trace it to the source. The motion-language block in the JSIN Exclusion Brief is a fixed template with cell-specific values substituted in, not AI-generated prose.

The data source is the U.S. Sentencing Commission's own annual datafile — the same underlying dataset the Commission uses for its published statistics and JSIN. Every figure in a BenchRecon brief is labeled with the USSC datafile vintage (e.g., "USSC Individual-Case Datafile, FY 2024") and is reproducible from the Commission's public download. The brief does not rely on web scraping, commercial aggregators, or any source that is not independently downloadable from ussc.gov. How you present the exhibit and authenticate it for the record is counsel's call — we document provenance so you have the factual basis to do that.

BenchRecon briefs are research exhibits, not legal services. Receiving a data exhibit from a non-attorney vendor is the same category of work product as retaining a licensed investigator, a forensic accountant, or a jury-consultant firm — all established forms of non-attorney litigation support. The brief does not contain legal advice, legal strategy, or an attorney-client relationship with BenchRecon. You review the data, apply your professional judgment, and decide what to file and how. Nothing in the output bypasses your role as counsel. If your jurisdiction has specific rules on non-attorney litigation support vendors, review those before use — but the brief is structured explicitly as a data exhibit, not as legal work product originating from a non-attorney.

JSIN reports a subset of the USSC's data — it excludes non-imprisonment sentences, cooperation departures, and mandatory-minimum-controlled cases from its published cell statistics. A Sentencing Snapshot includes the full USSC distribution for the cell, with the excluded slices broken out and explained. The JSIN Exclusion Brief quantifies the exclusion accounting and provides § 3006A motion language. (Under our current data tier, the brief itemizes non-imprisonment sentences, cooperation departures, and older-than-five-years cases by count; mandatory-minimum-controlled cases are disclosed but not yet separately counted — that quantification ships with the next data backfill.)

USSC annual datafiles are released each fall, covering the fiscal year ending September 30. We update our working dataset within 30 days of each annual release. The brief you receive identifies the USSC datafile vintage in the header.

PDF, delivered to the email address you provide at checkout — typically within 60 seconds of payment. The officer-record reports also include an editable DOCX. Each file is formatted as a litigation exhibit, designed to be printed or embedded in a filing without reformatting.

Compassionate release, yes — the Compassionate Release Research Pack is live. It returns the USSC grant rate for your district and asserted ground against the national baseline (with the case count behind each rate), the statutory posture under § 3582(c)(1)(A) or the Rule 35 boundary, and Amendment 821 retroactivity screening, every row sourced to the USSC datafile vintage. A standalone supervised-release product is not yet on offer.

No. Nothing in a BenchRecon brief constitutes legal advice, legal representation, or an attorney-client relationship. The brief is a public-records research exhibit. Your judgment as licensed counsel governs how it is used, whether it is disclosed, and whether it is appropriate for your client's case.

If you defend in Florida, Chicago, Texas, NYC, Georgia, Arizona, or California, you do not need one — Officer Lookup is live today: the search is a free read-only preview, and the full source-backed report for a named officer is $147. On the federal side, we are recruiting closed-beta participants from federal public defenders and CJA-panel attorneys in Northern California and Western Washington. Beta participants will receive early access to new products and direct input into what gets built. If you fit that description and want to be considered, email support@benchrecon.com with your bar number and practice description.

We are designing a firm subscription tier. If you are a PD office or a firm handling a significant caseload — state or federal — and want to discuss volume pricing, email support@benchrecon.com. We will work out the right arrangement.