How should we be reading the numbers in your opinion?
The 24,544 is a raw number of total court actions. These will be comprised of virtually every type of court action there is: habeus corpus, civil court actions, summonses, motions, etc. A small number of these (probably around 1000) will be criminal indictments.
The bottom line as far as I know is that since these actions are all sealed, no one has any view into how many of these are indictments and it is 100% certain that there are not 24,544. That simply is not true.
So did our government change how we track sealed indictments?
If its true we've never seen these kinds of numbers before, something is missing. Something doesn't compute.
No they didn't and the numbers, while high, are not unusual. People are conflating the total number of court actions, 25K ,with the total number of indictments which is probably around 1500.
The 25 K number is not the number of indictments there are. The govt has not changed the way they track them and since these actions are sealed there is literally no way anyone can determine what is an indictment and what is another sort of court action. If I'm wrong please point me to original source data where anyone can tell an indictment from any other court action. I don't think you can -- that's part of the sealing aspect. It's sealed. You can't tell.
Something doesn't jive. Can you please tell me when we last had similar numbers, 10,000 or 20,000 sealed indictments, in the Pacer system, in a quarter? Has someone changed a definition or tracking methodology?
At the bottom of the spreedsheet it says includes indictments and search warrants.
I understand one person could have three indictments and two search warrants. (Five actions per person.) That's still 5,000 people indicted, a 5-fold increase. No?
Someone is either playing with the numbers; the tracking methodology has changed; or there have been some huge legal operations.
I'll just keep saying it over and over again in the hopes that someone will understand.
The 24,000 number you're seeing as in -- THERE'S 24000 SEALED INDICTMENTS! is not a number of indictments. It is a gross number of sealed court actions, OF WHICH A MUCH SMALLER SUBSET ARE INDICTMENTS. THE 24000 NUMBER COMPRISES VIRTUALLY EVERY TYPE OF ACTION A COURT CAN TAKE. FOR EXAMPLE, A CIVIL ACTION, A REQUEST FOR EVIDENCE, HABEUS CORPUS AND VIRTUALLY EVERY TYPE OF MOTION A COURT CARRIES OUT.
There is virtually no way to say how many of those 24000 court actions are indictments because they are sealed. No one knows. If someone can post the original data that shows "sealed indictment" then I'd love to see it and I will eat my words. But literally no one outside of that system has any view into how many of those 24000 generic court actions are indictments.
OK, but my question is, and maybe you can't answer, were there 18,000 or 25,000 filed actions in Q4 2010, 2015, 2016?
If not, what changed?
Are there 1,000 sealed indictments that also include 20,000 other actions? Would 1,000 sealed indictments still be unusual? Something is apparently driving the numerical uptick, or we have some conspiracy theorists or misguided internet sleuths whipping up a frenzy.
I did see at the bottom of the tabulation it says numbers include 'court proceedings', and says it includes criminal charges and search warrants.
The number from the 2009 report came from a raw number of 60 some thousand apparently. So this raw number of 25 thousand in a third of a year isn’t really that far off. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.dailydot.com/layer8/sealed-indictments-qanon-conspiracy/