National, regional and international court records can contain specific information of relevance to casualty recorders. A major advantage of much court-produced material is that it becomes publicly available according to standard legal procedures.
Court records used by recorders tend to go deep into the evidence linking individual deaths to individual perpetrators, and as a result provide very detailed evidence on individual cases.This level detail is a characteristic of legal procedures, specific prosecutions depending on the bringing of sufficient evidence. This detail is both the advantage and disadvantage of court records. There are very large numbers of deaths in any situation that are never the subject of any court investigation and are never likely to be. Court judgments will give very high level of verification on the circumstances, victims and perpetrators of individual incidents. However, court documents will rarely be comprehensive across entire conflicts.
THE RANGE OF SOURCES IN CASUALTY RECORDING, pp. 9-10
