May 5, 2026
Order in the scoreboard!
A website ranking judges by elo for the cases they dismiss in SF
A courtroom ranking game just dropped, and the comments are yelling “what exactly are we scoring?”
TLDR: A new San Francisco site ranks judges based on which criminal charges they dismissed, but commenters are split between fascinated, horrified, and totally confused about what the scores even mean. The big debate: is this clever transparency, reckless gamification, or just turning serious court cases into a guessing game?
San Francisco now has a website that turns court dismissals into an Elo-style ranking game: you pick which charge sounds worse, and the judges who dismissed those cases get rated. That alone was enough to make the comment section go full courtroom reality show. Instead of cheering the data experiment, readers immediately started fighting over the basics: Is this exposing soft judges, mocking the justice system, or just confusing everyone? One baffled commenter practically grabbed the mic to ask whether a higher score is supposed to mean "good" or "bad," because the site’s wording left people wondering what exactly they were rewarding. Another begged for plain-English explanations of legal outcomes like diversion or “no sufficient cause,” because for regular people, the whole thing currently reads like legal Mad Libs.
And then came the hot takes. One commenter dropped the spiciest line of the thread, joking that gamifying everything was just society’s warm-up act for gambling on everything. Another pushed back hard, saying there simply isn’t enough detail in these public records to judge whether any dismissal was justified, urging everyone to calm down before turning accusations into verdicts. The funniest response came from a commenter who mock-accused you, the reader, of every unsolved murder in America just to hammer home the point: being charged is not the same as being guilty. So yes, the site ranks judges—but the real competition is in the comments, where confusion, ethics, and dark humor are battling for first place.
Key Points
- •The website asks users to compare charges by which sounds worse and uses that process in an Elo-style ranking of judges tied to dismissed or otherwise released cases.
- •Its record pool comes from the jamiequint/sf_criminal_court source.
- •Eligible records are charge dispositions with no jail or prison days and outcomes of diversion, dismissal, acquittal, deferred judgment, or discharge.
- •Dismissals connected to other charges, federal indictment, death, agency transfer, or violation proceedings are excluded from the dataset.
- •Judge attribution is based on exact case/date matches to published department assignments, and defendant ratings rely on normalized names from cases.parquet, with stated limitations on identity accuracy.