Uniform Statute Table Facilitates Information Flow
The Code of Virginia establishes and defines all criminal offenses in the Commonwealth, ranging from minor traffic violations up to capital murder. The Code is the authoritative legal reference for determining what constitutes a crime under the laws of Virginia. Anyone who has taken more than a cursory look at those parts of the Code dealing with crimes and offenses knows that Virginia’s criminal statutes are very complex.
That complexity made it very difficult for different components of the criminal justice system to compile and use offense and offender -based information: crimes reported, arrests made; charges filed, cases tried, sentences imposed. So agencies developed coding systems intended to translate the complicated array of criminal statutes into simpler, computer-useable form. These were, by and large, developed to meet the particular needs of the part of the criminal justice system that developed them: law enforcement, the courts, corrections.
As a result, in addition to the Code of Virginia statute citations, there are 4-digit-National Crime Information Center (NCIC) codes, 3-digit Incident-Based Report (IBR) codes, 11-character Virginia Crime Codes (VCCs), and others; and they don’t necessarily designate or define offenses the same way. This, of course, makes it hard for agencies in different parts of the criminal justice system that seek to share offense information to understand what offenses they are sharing information about.
Enter DCJS’ Integrated Justice Program (IJP) unit, which has developed the Uniform Statute Table (UST) to help solve this problem. The UST is an automated table containing the Code of Virginia citations for offenses as well as the other codes and designations for each offense. The UST also contains information such as the different penalties associated with different levels of each offense.
The UST’s standardized file structure can be used by different computer systems that need a look-up table to match criminal statutes with other designations for the same offense. The UST is currently being used in computer systems at the Virginia State Police, the Supreme Court of Virginia, and the Department of Corrections. It is also being used in the LiveScan fingerprint scanners at 264 Virginia law enforcement agencies and by private providers of criminal justice software.
Depending on their responsibilities, different criminal justice agencies and organizations need to know different things about offenses defined in the Code. Some of the more commonly used data elements for the offenses maintained in the UST include:
- Code of Virginia citation: the general and specific code cites for each offense
- 48 and 30 character offense descriptions for printing on reports or computer screens
- NCIC Code: Standardized 4-digit crime codes established by the FBI
- IBR Code: 3-character Incident Based Reporting Code
- VCC Code: 11-character Virginia Crime Code
- Type: Felony, Misdemeanor, Infraction, or Civil
- Class: Seriousness of felonies and misdemeanors
- CCRE Reportable: Whether the offense is required to be reported to the Central Criminal Records Exchange
- Enhanced Penalty (EP) Statutes: Associated statutes that may increase the penalty for a particular offense.
The UST is always a “work in progress” that the staff must continuously update to keep current. Every year, the General Assembly makes changes to the statutes, adding new offenses, modifying or deleting existing ones. The various coding systems, such as NCIC, IBR and the VCCs, are also periodically changed and reissued. The IJP staff does the ongoing legal research to update the UST with these changes and the programming needed to update the automated UST, and then makes it available to all of the agencies that use it. This information is posted for downloading by users at:
http://www.dcjs.virginia.gov/ijp/ust_data.cfm?menuLevel=0&mID=7
There are several versions or “extracts” of the UST. Most users are interested in either the Base Offense Table or the Full Table. The Base Offense Table is smaller and easier to understand because it contains only one record for each individual offense. The full table contains not only the Base Offenses but also the modified offense variations such as Attempts, Conspiracies, Solicitations, or Enhanced Penalties. These variations can sometimes cause the class, VCC code, or even the Type to change from the Base Offense.
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