These are the rules we hold ourselves to. They are short on purpose. Rules that need a lawyer to read are rules nobody follows.

Sourcing

We report from the primary record: court filings and dockets, police and incident reports, medical-examiner and autopsy findings, crime-lab results, official statements from the agencies involved, and documents we obtain under open-records and Freedom of Information laws. When we rely on another outlet’s reporting, we say whose it is.

Verification

A factual claim is checked against at least one primary source before it runs, and against more than one wherever the record allows. We keep three things separate on the page: what has been established, what has been alleged, and what is still unknown. We use the legal and forensic terms the record uses, and we explain them the first time.

News, analysis and opinion

Straight reporting and interpretation are kept apart. When we analyze a trial, a piece of evidence or a legal strategy, the piece says so. We don’t editorialize inside a news report, and we don’t dress up speculation as fact.

Presumption of innocence

Everyone charged with a crime is presumed innocent unless and until a court finds otherwise. We describe charges as allegations, we attribute accusations to whoever made them, and we report the outcome of a case, including an acquittal, a dismissal or an exoneration, with the same prominence we gave the charge.

Privacy and dignity

We weigh the public interest against the privacy of victims, survivors and families. We leave out detail whose only purpose is shock. We are careful with the identification of minors, victims of sexual offenses, and people who have been named in a record but never charged.

Working from the public record

Our Records Desk obtains records directly from the agencies and courts that hold them. Every request is logged and tracked. Records are kept exactly as they arrived; what we publish is a reviewed, redacted copy with its provenance stated. The review itself is described on the Records Desk page.

Use of technology

We use software, including AI tools, for transcription, document indexing and search, keeping timelines straight, and preparing drafts. Those tools are instruments, not sources. Nothing an AI system produces is treated as evidence of a fact, and every factual claim we publish has to resolve to an identified document that a person here has read. The same standards of sourcing, verification, fairness and correction apply to every piece regardless of what tools helped make it, and responsibility for what runs under our name is ours. In the documentaries, narration may be a synthetic voice and exhibits may be visualizations built from the record; where an image is illustrative or generated and could be mistaken for documentary evidence, we label it. We do not stage re-enactments of crimes and we do not produce AI depictions of real people involved in a case.

Independence

Crime Docket is editorially independent and supported by its audience. No subject, source or sponsor reviews or approves a piece before publication.

Corrections

When we get something wrong we fix it promptly and say what changed. The Corrections page explains how to ask for a correction or a right of reply.