Editorial policy and sourcing

criminallaw.wiki follows a primary-source policy: every factual statement on an article is tied to a numbered citation, and the citation points to the published source the statement comes from.

What counts as a source

• Primary law: the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Code, the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, state statutes, and court opinions cited by their official U.S. Reports citation.
• Official guidance and data: the U.S. Department of Justice, the federal courts, the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the FBI.
• Reference works: the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School, which publishes statutes, opinions and the Wex legal encyclopedia.
• Research and advocacy organizations are cited only for what they document, and are identified as such.

Writing rules

• No fact, number, date, case or citation is added unless a cited source states it. Statements that cannot be matched to a source are removed before publication.
• Federal and state law are kept distinct. Where states differ, pages say so rather than generalizing from one state.
• Pages describe what the law says. They do not tell readers what to do in their own cases.
• Pages use US spelling and plain language, and define legal terms in the glossary.

Dates

Each article shows a "Law checked as of" date. Laws change, so a page may not reflect changes made after that date.

Images

Photographs are public domain or free-licensed images from Wikimedia Commons, credited on each caption. Diagrams are drawn by criminallaw.wiki from the sources cited in their captions.

Corrections

Errors are corrected as soon as they are confirmed against a primary source, and the page's checked date is updated.

References

This page summarizes the wiki itself; sources are listed on each article.