Adults with finalised charges in court
We provide data to Stats NZ about adults (aged 17 years or older; and from 1 July 2019, 18 years and older) with finalised charges in court for official release on the Stats NZ website. In March we release the calendar year tables (year ending 31 December). In September we release the financial year tables (year ending 30 June).
From 1 July 2019, 17-year-olds became part of the youth justice system. Charges for 17-year-olds, filed from 1 July onwards, are treated and counted as ‘child and young person’ charges, and are not included in the adult statistics; they are included in the ‘child and young person’ statistics. Charges filed prior to this date are ‘adult’ charges and are therefore included in these statistics.
Go straight to the tables on Stats NZ's website(external link)
Our criminal courts data for adults is presented on three tables on the Stats NZ website:
- Charges finalised for adults by offence type – counts the total number of criminal charges for adults finalised in court each year. Adults often have multiple charges in a year, and sometimes one incident may lead to several charges in court, for one or more different offence types (for example, people charged with fraud often face several related charges). Each charge is counted separately in this table, and each charge has a separate outcome. This table provides a useful indicator of the volume and type of offences prosecuted each year, and therefore court workloads. This table can be broken down by court, offence type, and the outcome of the charge (for example, convicted, other proved, not proved or other).
- Adults with finalised charges in court – most serious offence – counts the number of adults with finalised charges in court each year. The table counts each person only once in a year for their most serious offence, regardless of which court they appeared in. Information about the offence type and the location of the court they appeared in is available in this table.
- Adults convicted in court by sentence type – most serious offence – counts the number of adults convicted each year by the type of sentence they received. This table can be broken down by age, gender and ethnicity. The table counts each person only once in a year for their most serious offence, regardless of which court they appeared in.
These tables go back as far as the 1980 calendar year for the March release and 1980/1981 financial year for the September release.
See the Justice statistics data tables for more detailed information on specific offence types and charge outcomes.
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