About CaseFinder

CaseFinder is a tool to help you find sentencing decisions for offences in the County and Supreme Courts of Victoria. CaseFinder connects information in sentencing statistics with publicly available sentencing decisions.

Using CaseFinder, you can quickly locate publicly available decisions for offences to find comparable cases. CaseFinder aims to make it easy for you to identify sentencing decisions that may assist in understanding current sentencing practices for an offence (Sentencing Act 1991 (Vic) s 5(2)(b)).

What’s included in CaseFinder

CaseFinder includes offences from all publicly available sentencing decisions in the higher courts from 1 July 2019 to 30 June 2024. For each offence, CaseFinder has:

• the case name and medium neutral citation
• the date of sentencing
• the sentence imposed on the individual charge of the offence
• the total sentence for the case that includes the offence
• the offender’s age group
• the offender’s gender
• a link to the published decision on AustLII.

How to use CaseFinder

Enter an offence in the search bar above the table and select from the dropdown list of offences. The number of matching entries appears above the table.

You can sort entries in the table by case (alphabetically), sentence date, sentencing outcomes (by sentence severity) and offender age and gender.

You can narrow your search using the filters to the right of the table. Use the radio buttons to select a sentence type (for sentences on individual charges, the total sentence in the case or both), the offender’s age group and the offender’s gender. You can filter imprisonment lengths by entering minimum and maximum values (in months or years). You can also limit your search to principal proven offences, successful appeal decisions or both using the checkboxes.

Once you’ve located cases that match your search criteria, click on the links in the ‘Case’ column to view the decision on AustLII.

About the information on CaseFinder

CaseFinder incorporates nearly 25,000 entries from over 5,000 cases for around 220 unique offences in our SACStat database. The cases in CaseFinder cover the same period as SACStat (currently the five years to 30 June 2024).

CaseFinder includes a separate entry for each offence that received a sentence. As a result, a single case may be listed multiple times: once for each offence in the case. Conversely, not all offences in a case appear in CaseFinder. This is because CaseFinder only includes cases involving offences in SACStat. If an offence was sentenced less than 10 times in a recent five-year period, it will not appear in SACStat or CaseFinder.

The abbreviation ‘PPO’ in the offence column indicates that the offence was the principal proven offence in the case. This is the charge that received the most severe sentence in the case.

CaseFinder only includes offences from publicly available sentencing decisions, not unpublished sentencing decisions. The links take you to the sentencing decision at first instance unless the Court of Appeal has resentenced an offender. In that instance, the link takes you to the appeal decision as this reflects the final sentence in the case. Note that CaseFinder only includes appeal decisions for successful conviction or sentence appeals that result in resentencing. It doesn’t include unsuccessful appeals.

CaseFinder only includes sentence lengths for imprisonment and youth justice centre orders that were not part of an aggregate sentence.

We have made every effort to ensure that the information on CaseFinder is accurate and that we have linked to the correct sentencing decision on AustLII. However, you should confirm that the linked decision is the correct case and it has the correct offence. In some instances, the offence may differ slightly to the one in CaseFinder (e.g. attempted armed robbery rather than armed robbery). Also, in some instances, the link may relate to another decision in the proceeding, such as an evidentiary ruling.

If you find an error in CaseFinder, please email us at contact@sentencingcouncil.vic.gov.au.