Use these links to access Ministry of Justice court statistics of completed criminal charges and cases.
Table Builder – prosecuted charges
Table Builder – prosecuted people
Table Builder – convicted offenders
Notes about the tables
Here are explanations about the three tables and what they contain:
- The prosecuted charges table contains the number of charges finalised in criminal courts during a calendar year. The tables provide information on the number of charges prosecuted in the New Zealand court system. For each calendar year, information is available on the court, type of offence, and outcome of the charge.
- The prosecuted people table provides information on the number of people whose prosecutions were finalised in criminal courts during a calendar year. For each calendar year, information is available on the court, type of offence, and outcome of the charge.
- The convicted offenders table contains the number of people whose convictions were finalised in criminal courts during a calendar year. For each calendar year, information is available on the age, gender, ethnicity, court region, type of offence, and type of sentence.
The tables available here contain data from the Ministry of Justice's statistical reporting datasets. The data were sourced from the courts' operational data systems. The Law Enforcement System (formerly known as the Wanganui Computer and used by justice agencies from the late 1970s until 2005) was used as the source of these data up to 2003. From 2004, the source of these data was the Case Management System of the Ministry of Justice.
Directly identifying details have been removed and there has been aggregation of data to limit information about individuals.
Child and youth offenders processed in the Youth Court have also been removed from these tables. A separate Table Builder release dedicated to Youth Court statistics will be available in the future.
Please note that this means some numbers in the tables will be lower than those in the 2009 calendar year release.
Other notes
Data quality notes
Revision of published data
Comparability with police crime data
Sentencing legislation
Conviction and sentencing statistics are currently available online at the Statistics New Zealand website, or in published form through the Ministry of Justice website: Conviction and Sentencing Statistical Bulletin 2010: An Overview of Conviction and Sentencing Statistics in New Zealand.