US Attorney Prosecution Data: The Federal Database Behind 80,000 Annual Criminal Cases

The 94 United States Attorneys offices prosecute every federal crime — drug trafficking, financial fraud, public corruption, terrorism, and violent crime — generating a public record through press releases, PACER dockets, and USAO annual statistical reports that together document over 80,000 criminal defendants per year in federal court.

What United States Attorneys offices are

The United States Attorneys are the chief federal law enforcement officers within their respective judicial districts. There are 94 United States Attorney offices corresponding to the 94 federal judicial districts, ranging from the District of Columbia and the Southern District of New York — each covering a single metropolitan area with enormous caseloads — to districts that span entire states. Each office is led by a presidentially appointed United States Attorney confirmed by the Senate. In practice, much of the day-to-day prosecution work is carried out by the approximately 5,700 Assistant United States Attorneys (AUSAs) who are career civil servants insulated from political transitions.

The institutional home for the 94 offices within DOJ is the Executive Office for United States Attorneys (EOUSA), which provides management oversight, policy guidance, training, and administrative support to all USAO offices. EOUSA sits within the Main Justice structure but USAO offices themselves have wide operational autonomy — each office sets its own enforcement priorities, decides which cases to bring, and exercises its own prosecutorial discretion subject to DOJ-wide policies and the oversight of Main Justice divisions.

USAOs work closely with the full range of federal investigative agencies. The FBI is the primary investigative partner for violent crime, public corruption, financial crime, national security, and counterterrorism matters. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) drives most drug trafficking referrals. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) investigates firearms offenses, illegal weapon trafficking, and arson. IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) provides financial crime expertise and handles tax fraud referrals. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations (ICE HSI) investigates human trafficking, transnational crime, export control violations, and immigration fraud. Customs and Border Protection refers immigration prosecution matters in border districts. The Postal Inspection Service, Secret Service, FDIC Office of Inspector General, HUD OIG, and dozens of other federal law enforcement components funnel referrals to USAOs.

Although USAOs are independent from Main Justice's litigating divisions — the Criminal Division, Civil Division, Civil Rights Division, Tax Division, National Security Division, and Environment and Natural Resources Division — coordination is ongoing. Main Justice divisions often direct or support high-profile prosecutions and may take over cases with national significance. The Tax Division must authorize all criminal tax prosecutions regardless of which USAO brings them. The National Security Division has oversight over terrorism and espionage matters. The Criminal Division's Fraud Section prosecutes major corporate fraud and Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) cases that may span multiple districts.

Annual prosecution statistics

The scale of federal prosecution is substantial. In recent fiscal years, USAOs have filed criminal charges against approximately 79,000 to 82,000 defendants annually. Civil matters — defensive litigation where the United States is sued, and affirmative civil enforcement cases — add another 90,000 matters per year. The USAO Statistical Report, published annually by EOUSA and available at justice.gov/usao/resources/annual-statistical-reports, is the primary authoritative source for aggregate prosecution data broken down by district and offense category.

The federal conviction rate is among the highest of any criminal justice system in the world. Approximately 90% of federal defendants who are charged are convicted — the overwhelming majority through guilty pleas rather than trial. The high conviction rate reflects both the severity of prosecutorial screening (USAOs decline cases where the evidence is insufficient), the incentives created by the Federal Sentencing Guidelines for defendants to plead rather than risk a trial penalty, and the substantial resources the government can bring to cases it does bring.

Declination rates vary significantly by district and by offense category. Districts with large border-adjacent territories, like the Southern District of California or the District of Arizona, decline a higher proportion of the immigration referrals they receive from CBP because volume far exceeds prosecutorial capacity. Districts with smaller caseloads and larger white-collar dockets, like the Southern District of New York or the District of Massachusetts, apply more selective screening to financial fraud referrals. The declination rate is not published in aggregate form by EOUSA and must be inferred from differences between referral counts (tracked by investigating agencies) and filed cases (tracked by USAO).

The DOJ press release database

Every significant federal prosecution generates a press release. DOJ and its component USAOs publish press releases at three stages of a typical case: at indictment or arraignment, at plea or conviction, and at sentencing. Across all 94 USAOs plus Main Justice components, the volume of press releases runs to approximately 50,000 or more per year. These press releases are the most accessible public window into individual federal criminal cases short of pulling the underlying PACER docket.

Every DOJ press release follows a standard structure that makes them amenable to systematic parsing. The headline states the defendant's name and the outcome: a conviction, a sentence, or an indictment. The body paragraph identifies the district, the specific charges with citation to the relevant United States Code section, and the maximum statutory penalty. Subsequent paragraphs describe the facts of the offense as the government alleges them, identify the investigating agencies and agents, name the AUSA handling the case, and note any co-defendants or related cases. Sentencing press releases add the actual sentence imposed and, in financial crime cases, the restitution amount ordered.

DOJ maintains a searchable press release index at justice.gov/news. The underlying content is also accessible through a JSON API endpoint at justice.gov/api/v1/press-releases that accepts query parameters for keyword search, date range, and component office filtering. Individual USAO press releases can be filtered by including the district office name as a component parameter. The API returns structured JSON with fields for title, date, body text, URL, and associated metadata tags.

Press releases are also published via RSS feeds, which many USAOs maintain as separate feeds by district. Aggregating the RSS feeds from all 94 districts is technically feasible and provides a near-real-time stream of federal prosecution announcements. Because each district publishes its own feed independently, feed reliability varies — some districts update within hours of filing an announcement, others lag by days.

PACER integration and case docket access

DOJ press releases consistently cross-reference the PACER case number for the underlying matter, typically stated in the format 1:24-cr-00123 with the division number, two-digit year, case type (cr for criminal), and sequential docket number. This cross-reference allows any reader to retrieve the underlying criminal docket from PACER and access all documents filed in the case: the indictment or information, plea agreement, sentencing memoranda from both parties, pre-sentence investigation report (frequently sealed), and the judgment and commitment order that records the sentence.

The PACER docket contains far more information than the press release. The indictment sets out the government's full theory of the case, including specific acts, dates, and amounts. Plea agreements in federal court are often detailed documents that include a factual basis section — a signed admission by the defendant of the specific conduct that constitutes the charged offense — making them among the most detailed public admissions of corporate or individual wrongdoing available. Sentencing memoranda filed by the government lay out the complete factual record and the government's sentencing position under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines.

For researchers who cannot absorb the per-page PACER fee at scale, the Free Law Project's CourtListener platform provides a free mirror of many significant criminal cases through the RECAP Archive. CourtListener maintains a REST API at courtlistener.com/api/rest/v3/ that allows programmatic retrieval of dockets, party information, and case documents for cases that have been mirrored through the RECAP browser extension or through bulk data acquisition programs. Criminal cases involving public officials, major financial crimes, and national security matters are well represented in the RECAP Archive because they tend to attract legal practitioners and journalists who use the extension.

Drug trafficking prosecutions

Drug offenses account for roughly 28% of all federal criminal defendants in recent fiscal years, making them the second-largest offense category after immigration matters. Federal drug prosecution differs from state prosecution in scope and emphasis: federal cases tend to focus on trafficking organizations, distribution networks, and importation rather than simple possession, though mandatory minimum statutes and prosecutorial discretion vary by district and administration.

The DEA is the primary investigative partner for drug trafficking cases, but federal drug prosecutions also draw on multi-agency task forces — the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF) program coordinates DEA, FBI, ICE HSI, ATF, IRS-CI, and CBP on complex trafficking investigations targeting drug supply chains from production through distribution. OCDETF cases are tracked separately from routine drug referrals and tend to involve higher-level targets, larger quantities, and more complex conspiracy charges.

Federal drug sentencing is governed by the mandatory minimum provisions of 21 USC 841 and the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. Mandatory minimums for drug offenses depend on drug type and quantity: five-year minimums apply at lower thresholds, ten-year minimums at higher thresholds, and 20-year or life sentences at the highest levels or when death results. The safety valve provision at 18 USC 3553(f) allows defendants with minimal criminal histories who meet specified criteria to be sentenced below the mandatory minimum; eligibility for the safety valve is frequently litigated in plea negotiations.

The kingpin statute, 21 USC 848 (Continuing Criminal Enterprise), applies to defendants who organize, supervise, or manage five or more persons in a continuing series of felony drug violations and receive substantial income from the enterprise. CCE convictions carry mandatory life sentences in the most serious cases and have been used against cartel leadership. Fentanyl prosecutions have occupied an increasing share of the federal drug docket since approximately 2018, driven by the opioid epidemic and the shift from prescription opioid diversion to illicit fentanyl distributed through street markets. Fentanyl's high potency means that quantities sufficient to trigger the highest mandatory minimums can be physically small, and resulting death cases under 21 USC 841(b)(1)(C) have increased substantially.

Public corruption prosecutions

Federal public corruption prosecution targets elected officials, appointed officials, judges, law enforcement officers, and private parties who bribe them. The FBI's Public Corruption Unit coordinates with USAOs on these investigations nationally; each major USAO also has dedicated prosecutors assigned to public corruption matters. The offense category is smaller in volume than drugs or immigration but receives disproportionate press release coverage given the public status of the defendants.

The primary federal corruption statutes are 18 USC 201 (bribery of federal officials), 18 USC 666 (theft or bribery concerning programs receiving federal funds — the workhorse statute for state and local official corruption because federal funds flow to virtually every state and local government entity), and 18 USC 1341/1343 (mail and wire fraud), which has been used expansively to prosecute schemes to defraud the public of honest services under the honest services fraud theory (18 USC 1346).

The honest services fraud theory — which criminalizes schemes to deprive the public of a public official's undisclosed self-dealing — was narrowed by the Supreme Court in Skilling v. United States (2010) to cover only bribery and kickback schemes, excluding undisclosed conflicts of interest that do not involve explicit quid pro quo arrangements. The Hobbs Act (18 USC 1951), which prohibits extortion and robbery affecting interstate commerce, is frequently used alongside bribery charges because extortion under color of official right — a public official demanding payment as a condition of performing an official act — is treated as extortion even where the payment is framed as voluntary.

Notable public corruption cases illustrate the range of targets: former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was convicted on federal corruption charges including attempting to sell Barack Obama's Senate seat; former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert pleaded guilty to federal banking violations arising from hush-money payments related to earlier sexual misconduct. At the state and local level, the Southern District of New York has prosecuted New York City Council members, state legislators, and law enforcement officials, making it one of the most active public corruption dockets in the country.

Financial fraud prosecutions

Fraud offenses account for roughly 13% of federal criminal defendants annually. The category is broad, spanning securities fraud, wire fraud, bank fraud, healthcare fraud, mail fraud, mortgage fraud, identity theft, and the full range of schemes to obtain money by false representations. Financial fraud cases tend to produce the largest monetary amounts in federal criminal restitution orders.

Ponzi scheme prosecutions represent one of the most high-profile subcategories. Bernie Madoff's $65 billion Ponzi scheme — the largest in history — was prosecuted in the Southern District of New York after Madoff's own confession to FBI agents in December 2008. The resulting USDO press releases, plea agreement, sentencing submissions, and judgment are all available through PACER and represent the public record of the largest securities fraud in American history. Allen Stanford's $7 billion Ponzi scheme was prosecuted in the Southern District of Texas; Tom Petters' $3.7 billion scheme in the District of Minnesota. More recently, COVID-19 relief program fraud — spanning CARES Act Paycheck Protection Program loans, Economic Injury Disaster Loans, and pandemic unemployment benefits — generated a massive fraud prosecution wave. The CARES Act authorized approximately $1.4 trillion in relief programs; DOJ has charged defendants in virtually every district with obtaining fraudulent relief funds.

Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement, led primarily by Main Justice's Criminal Division Fraud Section but supported by USAO prosecutions in districts where defendants are located, involves bribery of foreign government officials by US companies or companies with US-listed securities. FCPA cases frequently resolve through Deferred Prosecution Agreements (DPAs) or Non-Prosecution Agreements (NPAs) that impose fines and compliance monitors without conviction, generating a separate category of corporate criminal resolution that falls outside the traditional PACER docket structure.

Civil rights and national security prosecutions

Civil rights prosecutions under the criminal statutes enforced by the DOJ Civil Rights Division's Criminal Section — hate crimes (18 USC 249), excessive force under color of law (18 USC 242), and civil rights conspiracy (18 USC 241) — are prosecuted by USAOs with guidance and support from the Civil Rights Division. These cases are numerically small but legally significant. The conviction of Derek Chauvin under 18 USC 242 for violating George Floyd's constitutional rights was prosecuted in the District of Minnesota and generated extensive press release and PACER record. Hate crime prosecutions under 18 USC 249 (the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act) cover bias-motivated crimes based on race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability.

National security matters — terrorism, espionage, export control violations, and Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) enforcement — are coordinated through DOJ's National Security Division (NSD) and prosecuted by USAOs in the relevant districts. FARA prosecutions, brought against individuals who act as agents of foreign governments without proper registration, have increased substantially since approximately 2017, reflecting heightened attention to foreign influence operations. The statutory violation, 22 USC 611, carries a maximum five-year sentence; prosecutions have included lobbyists, political operatives, and former government officials.

Export control criminal prosecutions — violations of the Export Administration Regulations and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act — involve the unlicensed export of controlled technology, equipment, or dual-use goods to sanctioned countries or restricted end-users. These cases are investigated by Commerce Department Office of Export Enforcement, BIS, FBI, and ICE HSI, and prosecuted in districts where the export transaction was arranged or where the defendant is located.

Notable district offices

The 94 USAO offices vary enormously in size, caseload composition, and national profile. Several have developed reputations that shape how federal practitioners perceive the federal prosecution landscape.

The Southern District of New York (SDNY) is widely regarded as the most prestigious and powerful US Attorney's office in the country, a reputation earned through decades of landmark prosecutions: the Gambino and Genovese crime family cases of the 1980s, the Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken insider trading cases, the September 11 prosecutions, and the Bernie Madoff case. SDNY's informal nickname — the “Sovereign District” — reflects its practice of operating with unusual independence from Main Justice, including on occasion declining to coordinate investigations with other offices or the FBI field office. The SDNY has concurrent jurisdiction over Wall Street financial crime with its geographic proximity to the major financial institutions, giving it first claim on the most significant securities and banking fraud prosecutions.

The Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA) is nicknamed the “Rocket Docket” for its unusually fast case resolution times, which reflect both a culture of strict scheduling enforcement and a judiciary that prides itself on efficiency. EDVA handles a high volume of national security and espionage cases because it encompasses the CIA headquarters in Langley, the Pentagon in Arlington, and numerous other intelligence community installations in Northern Virginia. High-profile EDVA cases have included the prosecutions of Robert Hanssen (FBI mole), Aldrich Ames (CIA mole), the Washington, D.C. snipers, and the Paul Manafort prosecution.

The Central District of California (CDCA) handles one of the largest federal criminal dockets in the country, encompassing Los Angeles, Orange County, and the surrounding region. CDCA prosecutes substantial volumes of drug trafficking, healthcare fraud, and financial crime given the size of its population and the concentration of healthcare industry billing in Southern California. It also handles a significant share of immigration prosecutions through its proximity to the border.

The District of Columbia occupies a unique position because it covers both routine federal crime in the nation's capital and matters with national political significance. The January 6, 2021 Capitol riot generated more than 1,100 federal prosecutions, the largest single-event criminal investigation in American history, conducted entirely through the DC district. The prosecutions covered a range of charges from misdemeanor trespassing through felony seditious conspiracy, with the highest charges brought against members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. The DC district also handles prosecutions of foreign diplomats and officials charged with crimes in Washington, cases involving the executive and legislative branches, and matters arising from the special counsel investigations that have been assigned to the DC district in recent years.

The DOJ press release API

The most accessible programmatic interface to federal prosecution data is the DOJ press release JSON API. The endpoint at justice.gov/api/v1/press-releases accepts GET requests with query parameters that allow filtering by keyword, date, and organizational component. No API key is required, though rate limiting applies at high request volumes. The response format is JSON with a results array containing individual press release records.

Each result object contains the press release title, a publication date, a body field with the full press release text (typically HTML), a URL path at justice.gov, and metadata tags including the organizational component (which USAO or Main Justice division published it). Filtering by component allows a researcher to retrieve all press releases from a specific district, such as the Southern District of New York, without receiving press releases from other components in the same query.

The URL pattern for individual USAO press release pages follows the structure justice.gov/usao-[district-abbreviation]/pr/[press-release-slug]. District abbreviations use a standardized convention: usao-sdny for the Southern District of New York, usao-edva for the Eastern District of Virginia,usao-cdca for the Central District of California, and so forth. Individual USAO press release pages can also be scraped directly from the district's own news page, which typically exposes a paginated list of releases ordered by date.

For longitudinal analysis, the API supports date range filtering that allows a researcher to pull all press releases for a given district across a multi-year period. The combination of component filtering and date range filtering produces a dataset that, while requiring natural language parsing to extract structured case information (defendant name, charges, sentence), contains the most complete public record of individual federal prosecution outcomes available outside of PACER itself.

Python: querying the DOJ press release API

The following script demonstrates the DOJ press release API endpoint and shows how to retrieve and display recent press releases matching a keyword query. It then prints a summary of published USAO FY2022 statistical highlights drawn from the EOUSA annual statistical report. Because the DOJ does not publish a structured case-level API covering all 80,000+ annual federal criminal defendants, the press release API and the annual statistical report are the two principal programmatic access points for aggregate federal prosecution data.

import requests
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
import json

# DOJ Press Releases -- search API
# justice.gov provides a search endpoint
base = "https://www.justice.gov/api/v1/press-releases"
params = {
    "pagesize": 20,
    "page": 0,
    "query": "fraud conviction sentenced",
    "sort_by": "field_date",
    "sort_order": "DESC",
}
headers = {"Accept": "application/json"}

resp = requests.get(base, params=params, headers=headers, timeout=20)
if resp.status_code == 200:
    data = resp.json()
    results = data.get("results", [])
    print(f"DOJ press releases matching 'fraud conviction sentenced': {data.get('count', 0)} total")
    for r in results[:5]:
        title = r.get("title", "")
        date = r.get("date", "")
        body = r.get("body", "")[:120].replace("\n", " ")
        print(f"  {date[:10]}  {title[:70]}")
        print(f"           {body}...")
else:
    print(f"Status {resp.status_code} -- check justice.gov/api/v1/ for endpoint schema")

# USAO Statistics -- annual report data
# Published at justice.gov/usao/resources/annual-statistical-reports
print("\n--- USAO FY2022 Statistical Highlights ---")
print("Criminal defendants filed:        ~79,600")
print("Immigration matters:              ~24,800")
print("Drug matters:                     ~22,100")
print("Fraud matters:                    ~10,700")
print("Weapons matters:                   ~8,900")
print("Civil matters filed:              ~91,200")
print("Conviction rate:                      90.5%")

Several practical notes for using the API at scale. The query parameter accepts free-text keyword searches applied against the press release title and body. Restricting queries to specific offense types — “drug trafficking sentenced,” “bank fraud sentenced,” “public corruption convicted” — substantially reduces noise compared to broad queries. The API paginates through the page parameter; iterating through pages until the results array is empty covers the full result set for a given query. For district-specific queries, adding ?conditions[component][]=usao-sdny or the equivalent component identifier constrains results to that office's publications. The sort_by=field_date and sort_order=DESC parameters return the most recent releases first, which is useful for monitoring recent prosecution activity. Rate limiting is not formally documented but consistent high-frequency polling will eventually trigger HTTP 429 responses; implementing exponential backoff and caching downloaded pages locally avoids re-fetching already-retrieved content.

Connecting to the Federal Data Hub

USAO prosecution data intersects with nearly every other federal regulatory and enforcement dataset in the Federal Data Hub. PACER cross-references connect individual DOJ press releases to the underlying criminal dockets that include charging documents, plea agreements, and sentencing materials. IRS-CI case referrals generate both USAO press releases and Tax Division announcements that share case numbers with the parallel PACER docket. OFAC sanctions designations against individuals are frequently accompanied by DOJ criminal charges prosecuted through the relevant USAO. SEC enforcement actions against individuals often proceed in parallel with DOJ criminal referrals, with the SEC civil complaint and the DOJ indictment filed on the same day in coordinated announcements. FBI UCR data on federal crime volumes provides a context layer for interpreting changes in USAO filing statistics over time.

The USAO annual statistical report data is particularly valuable as a denominator for calculating rates from other enforcement datasets. Knowing that approximately 22,000 drug defendants were filed in federal court in FY2022 allows a researcher to compute what fraction of those cases involved mandatory minimum sentences, what fraction received safety valve relief, and how average sentences varied across districts and drug types when those statistics are published in DOJ sentencing data and United States Sentencing Commission (USSC) reports. The USSC publishes its own annual statistical report and case-level datasets that provide defendant-level sentencing outcomes, including the offense category, offense level under the Guidelines, criminal history category, and the sentence imposed, for every sentenced federal defendant in the country. This dataset, available at ussc.gov/research/datafiles, is the richest case-level public source for federal prosecution outcomes and complements the USAO statistical report's district-level aggregate data.

Related: DOJ Civil Rights Division · IRS Criminal Investigation · PACER federal courts

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