By Susan Tebben

Despite state legislation to monitor court sentencing data and race statistics, Ohio’s courts have not been collecting or sharing information vital to keep the courts and the public informed about judicial activity.

That’s what judges, including two from the state’s highest court, said about a new sentencing database they say will help keep judges honest about reasons for sentencing, and level the playing field for defendants.

In a public forum hosted by the Ohio Metropolitan Bar Association Consortium, Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor said the database that has been a dream for nearly three decades needs to happen. 

“The establishment and the widespread use of databases that are truly useful for the fair and equitable administration of justice continues to elude us,” O’Connor said. “The efforts so far could easily be called haphazard.”

O’Connor said the lack of action isn’t just at the level of the courts, but in all aspects of the judicial system, all the way from law enforcement and prosecutors to judges.

“I believe that this situation should be an embarrassment to all of us,” O’Connor said. “I know I’m embarrassed about it.”

Ohio’s sentencing and criminal justice data is disparate and only focuses on a few outcomes, such as prison time. Sara Andrews, director of the Ohio Criminal Sentencing Commission, said what little current data there is misses other punishments like probation and community service, other outcomes post-trial.

“(What is needed) is a felony sentencing database that can and will enhance public confidence (and) trust in the system by making information accessible, consumable and reportable,” Andrews said.

Currently, Andrews said the major source of aggregate data is prison population.

“Knowing more about the people who don’t go to prison is essential to inform public policy,” Andrews said.

The process of creating a database to keep track of sentencing statistics, such as felony charges, race of the defendant and specific sentence information, was supposed to be enacted starting in 1996. 

In July of that year, the 121st Ohio General Assembly passed Senate Bill 2, in which the legislature requested the Ohio Supreme Court require each common pleas court within the state maintain information about every felony case in a publicly accessible file. 

“That has not been done,” O’Connor said.

A few years later, a state commission on racial fairness recommended that statistical data “as to race” be maintained. O’Connor said no action was taken on that recommendation either.

Judges are given a large amount of discretion when it comes to sentencing, as several of the judges in the public forum said should be the case. But publicizing those decisions is important to keep those judges accountable to those they serve and maintaining consistency in sentences for similar crimes.

“Public confidence is diminished when our citizens believe…that the outcomes of the criminal justice system don’t arise from necessarily the application of the rule of law,” state Supreme Court Justice Michael P. Donnelly said. “But, rather the impression that the outcome of your criminal case … is largely dependent on the judge that is assigned to your case at the arraignment room.”

Not only does the public need to know how their courts are working, but policy makers need the information provided from a universal database to make sure the current laws are working, or change the laws that need revision, said Judge Ray Headen, of the Eighth District Court of Appeals. 

Judge Gene Zmuda, of the Sixth District Court of Appeals said the social unrest being exhibited throughout the country should be viewed as a motivation to make these databases a priority, so that those seeing the racial disparities in the justice system see a system trying to change its ways. 

O’Connor said she plans to use the last two years of her term to make the database and monitoring a priority.

“This is the time to do something, I think the political will is present at this time, the momentum is present, and we are going to do something on this,” O’Connor said.

This article was republished with permission from Ohio Capital Journal. For more in Ohio political news, visit www.ohiocapitaljournal.com.

Database schema templates

Collection of
Laravel
database schemas from open-source packages and real-world apps that you can use as inspiration when architecting your app.

A dynamic table component for Laravel Livewire

This package is still in development and does not have a test suite.

A dynamic Laravel Livewire component for data tables.

This plugin assumes you already have Laravel Livewire installed and configured in your project.

Installation

You can install the package via composer:

composer require rappasoft/laravel-livewire-tables

Usage

Creating Tables

To create a table component you can start with the below stub:

<?php

namespace App\Http\Livewire;

use App\User;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Builder;
use Rappasoft\LaravelLivewireTables\Views\Column;
use Rappasoft\LaravelLivewireTables\TableComponent;

class UsersTable extends TableComponent
{

    public function query() : Builder
    {
        return User::with('role')
            ->withCount('permissions');
    }

    public function columns() : array
    {
        return [
            Column::make('ID')
                ->searchable()
                ->sortable(),
            Column::make('Name')
                ->searchable()
                ->sortable(),
            Column::make('E-mail', 'email')
                ->searchable()
                ->sortable(),
            Column::make('Role', 'role.name')
                ->searchable()
                ->sortable(),
            Column::make('Permissions', 'permissions_count')
                ->sortable(),
            Column::make('Actions')
                ->view('backend.auth.user.includes.actions'),
        ];
    }
}

Your component must implement two methods:

/**
 * This defines the start of the query, usually Model::query() but can also eagar load relationships and counts.
 */
public function query() : Builder;

/**
 * This defines the columns of the table, they don't necessarily have to map to columns on the table.
 */
public function columns() : array;

Rendering the Table

Place the following where you want the table to appear.

Laravel 6.x:

@livewire('users-table')

Laravel 7.x:

<livewire:users-table />

Obviously replace users-table with your component name.

Defining Columns

You can define the columns of your table with the column class:

Column::make('Name', 'column_name')

The first parameter is the name of the table header. The second parameter is the name of the table column. You can leave blank and the lowercase snake_case version will be used by default.

Here are a list of the column method you can chain to build your columns:

/**
 * This column is searchable, with no callback it will search the column by name or by the supplied relationship, using a callback overrides the default searching functionality.
 */
public function searchable(callable $callable = null) : self;

/**
 * This column is sortable, with no callback it will sort the column by name and sort order defined on the components $sortDirection variable
 */
public function sortable(callable $callable = null) : self;

/**
 * The columns output will be put through {!! !!} instead of .
 */
public function unescaped() : self;

/**
 * The columns output will be put through the Laravel HtmlString class.
 */
public function html() : self;

/**
 * This column will not look on the table for the column name, it will look on the model for the given attribute. Useful for custom attributes like getFullNameAttribute: Column::make('Full Name', 'full_name')->customAttribute()
 */
public function customAttribute() : self;

/**
 * This view will be used for the column, can still be used with sortable and searchable.
 */
public function view($view, $viewModelName = 'model') : self;

Properties

You can override any of these in your table component:

Table

Searching

Sorting

Pagination

Loading

Offline

Checkboxes

Other

Table Methods

/**
 * Used to set a class on a table header based on the column attribute
 */
public function setTableHeadClass($attribute) : ?string;

/**
 * Used to set a ID on a table header based on the column attribute
 */
public function setTableHeadId($attribute) : ?string;

/**
 * Used to set any attributes on a table header based on the column attribute
 * ['name' => 'my-custom-name', 'data-key' => 'my-custom-key']
 */
public function setTableHeadAttributes($attribute) : array;

/**
 * Used to set a class on a table row
 * You have the entre model of the row to work with
 */
public function setTableRowClass($model) : ?string;

/**
 * Used to set a ID on a table row
 * You have the entre model of the row to work with
 */
public function setTableRowId($model) : ?string;

/**
 * Used to set any attribute on a table row
 * You have the entre model of the row to work with
 * ['name' => 'my-custom-name', 'data-key' => 'my-custom-key']
 */
public function setTableRowAttributes($model) : array;

/**
 * Used to set the class of a table cell based on the column and the value of the cell
 */
public function setTableDataClass($attribute, $value) : ?string;

/**
 * Used to set the ID of a table cell based on the column and the value of the cell
 */
public function setTableDataId($attribute, $value) : ?string;

/**
 * Used to set any attributes of a table cell based on the column and the value of the cell
 * ['name' => 'my-custom-name', 'data-key' => 'my-custom-key']
 */
public function setTableDataAttributes($attribute, $value) : array;

Components

Along with being able to provide a view to a column, you can use pre-defined components that are built into the package. These are good for when you want to add actions to a column.

Note: By design using the components() method on a column will disable all other functionality (i.e. searching/sorting etc.).

Defining Components for a Column

Column::make('Actions')
    ->components([
        Link::make('Edit'),
        Link::make('Delete'),
    ])

or

Column::make('Actions')
    ->addComponent(Link::make('Edit'))
    ->addComponent(Link::make('Delete'))

If you would like to hide all the components for a given row, you may pass a callback as the second parameter of the components() method:

Column::make('Actions')
    ->components([
        Link::make('Edit'),
        Link::make('Delete'),
    ], function($model) {
        // Hide the actions for model id 1
        return $model->id === 1;
    })

Note: You should still assert on the backend that these functions can not be performed on this entity.

Building on that, if you would like to pass a custom message to that column when hiding the components for this row, you may pass another callback as the third parameter:

Column::make('Actions')
    ->components([
        Link::make('Edit'),
        Link::make('Delete'),
    ], function($model) {
        // Hide the actions for model id 1
        return $model->id === 1;
    }, function($model) {
        return __('You can not alter role ' . $model->name . '.');
    })

Methods

Of course two links that don’t do anything would be useless, here are a list of methods to be used for the built in components.

Inherited by all components

By default, all components have access to the $attributes and $options arrays.

Link Component

Button Component

Example

This example comes from the upcoming release of my popular Laravel Boilerplate Project. Here we render the roles table in the admin panel.

This example uses searching, sorting, relationships, custom attributes, counted relationships, and components:

public function columns() : array {
    return [
        Column::make('Name')
            ->searchable()
            ->sortable(),
        Column::make('Permissions', 'permissions_label')
            ->customAttribute()
            ->html()
            ->searchable(function($builder, $term) {
                return $builder->orWhereHas('permissions', function($query) use($term) {
                   return $query->where('name', 'like', '%'.$term.'%');
                });
            }),
        Column::make('Number of Users', 'users_count')
            ->sortable(),
        Column::make('Actions')
            ->components([
                Link::make('Edit') // Optionally pass false to hide the text
                    ->icon('fas fa-pencil-alt')
                    ->class('btn btn-primary btn-sm')
                    ->href(function($model) {
                        return route('admin.auth.role.edit', $model->id);
                    })
                    ->hideIf(auth()->user()->cannot('access.roles.edit')),
                Link::make('Delete')
                    ->icon('fas fa-trash')
                    ->class('btn btn-danger btn-sm')
                    ->setAttribute('data-method', 'delete') // Javascript takes over and injects a hidden form
                    ->href(function($model) {
                        return route('admin.auth.role.destroy', $model->id);
                    })
                    ->hideIf(auth()->user()->cannot('access.roles.delete')),
            ], function($model) {
                // Hide components for this row if..
                return $model->id === config('access.roles.admin');
            }),
    ];
}

Inspiration From:

Changelog

Please see CHANGELOG for more information what has changed recently.

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING for details.

Security

If you discover any security related issues, please email rappa819@gmail.com instead of using the issue tracker.

Credits

License

The MIT License (MIT). Please see License File for more information.

Short URL v4.0.0

New Features

Added optional config validation (#50)

Up until now, the values defined in the short-url.php config file were always validated. However, this sometimes caused issues if the application’s config was cached before running composer require. A new config variable has been added which can now be used to toggle whether if the validation should be run. By default, the validation is now disabled.

To enable the validation, you can add the following line to your short-url.php config file:

'validate_config' => true,

Dropped Laravel 5.8 support (#51)

As of Short URL v4.0.0, Laravel 5.8 is no longer supported. Therefore, you must be using a minimum of Laravel 6.0 to use this library.

Note: The ShortURLBuilder will remain in version 3.* of the library but will be removed in version 4.0.0.

Removed the ShortURLBuilder facade (#53)

The ShortURLBuilder facade was deprecated in v3.0.0 to fit more with the Laravel naming conventions and standards. As of Short URL, v4.0.0 the ShortURLBuilder facade has now been removed in favour of a newer ShortURL facade.

ISRAEL—Working at an archaeological dig in the Valley of Elah, Bible experts have come up with an interesting theory concerning the death of Goliath, hulking giant of the Philistines who fought David in one-on-one combat.

Though he did have severe head trauma and neck problems, his death is now being counted as a COVID-19 death.

“While we didn’t test him per se, he exhibited a lot of the symptoms of COVID-19,” said one Bible scholar as he carefully worked to unearth some ancient face masks from Bible times. “The wooziness, the falling down, the headache — it’s all pretty clearly indicative of the novel coronavirus.” He also stated that the virus ran rampant among the Philistines because they did not social distance, while Israel was relatively safe because King Saul declared a lockdown.

One researcher suggested that Goliath did not die of coronavirus but simply ODed, having been stoned. But then the other researchers realized he was telling a dad joke and told him to shut up and keep digging.

At publishing time, scholars had proposed that everyone who died in the Flood, the Israelite conquest of Canaan, and the flattening of Sodom and Gomorrah also died of COVID-19.