JusticeText

JusticeText is the first centralized infrastructure to store, catalog, analyze, and share video evidence in the criminal justice system. We improve outcomes for low-income defendants by enabling accountability in policing.

Our web-based evidence management software employs automated speech recognition algorithms to generate interactive transcripts of audiovisual evidence. Attorneys use the software to take timestamped notes, create video clips, and catalog their digital discovery. We also identify keywords that may be of interest to criminal defense lawyers, including references to crimes, medical conditions, and legal terminology. We are equipping public defenders with the tools needed to identify instances of racial profiling, coercive interrogation tactics, and any other violations of their clients’ rights.

A criminal legal aid attorney in Georgia said, ”It allows us to do better work and more work for each of our clients because we don't have to focus so much on listening to videos and jail calls for hours at a time. We have a case with well over 100 jail calls, and using JusticeText has given us a way to decide which ones are important more quickly."

Our nation’s 15,000 public defenders serve over 5.6 million low-income individuals every year. To see how thoroughly poverty is criminalized in America, we need only look at a 2015 Bureau of Justice Statistics study which reveals that over 80% of felony defendants in the largest counties rely on publicly financed attorneys. Unfortunately, public defenders are obligated to assume responsibility for far more clients than they can be reasonably expected to protect. This crisis is further exacerbated by the lack of technology designed for public defense, especially as digital surveillance transforms the very nature of the modern justice system. 

A staggering 93% of public defenders in Virginia reported difficulty in finding time to review all the footage for their cases. The longer it takes for lawyers to review the data, the longer everyday citizens spend detained in our nation’s jails. A Chief Public Defender in Kansas recently told us, “I do have a case right now where a client looking at damn near 100 years in prison needs help. Specifically, there are about 500 jail calls that need to be reviewed in hopes that we can find the needle of one conversation in that larger haystack of 500 jail calls."

To date, we have partnered with public defense agencies, legal aid nonprofits, and private criminal defense attorneys across 8 states, including Virginia, New York, Georgia, and Colorado.

Over two-thirds of the public defenders we surveyed encounter 10+ hours of audiovisual evidence every month. These recordings of police interactions, witness interrogations, and jailhouse phone conversations help attorneys craft a stronger case in defense of their clients. However, with their unsustainably high caseloads, public defenders lack the bandwidth to review it all. Robert Moody from the Newport News Public Defender was quoted in The Virginian-Pilot as saying, “It is completely overwhelming. There’s no way physically possible I can watch the (video) data dumps they give me.” This has a direct impact on the hundreds of thousands of low-income individuals detained in our nation’s jails pre-trial, 70% of whom have never been convicted of a crime. 

By empowering public defenders to more effectively process digital evidence, our product helps ensure that their clients receive access to fairer, more expedited outcomes. Here are testimonials from a few early adopters:

“At every point of the case you’re working with discovery, whether it’s advising a client about options, or you’re negotiating, or you’re getting ready for trial. JusticeText has been so helpful during these processes. I used to have to do two passes through any video and audio discovery. JusticeText allows me to do just one pass through the content, cutting the amount of time that I spend on review in half.”

Public Defender in Texas

“The written transcript [in JusticeText] made it much easier for [us] to go through the discovery and determine that we didn’t even need another statement (because the recorded statement was a slam dunk for the defense…officer caught saying that he didn’t think our client should be charged). An added bonus was that we now had it in writing for the prosecutor to read (and hopefully realize that they had no case).”

Investigator in Minnesota

On February 15, 2019, my co-founder and I traveled 30 minutes north of campus to visit the Cook County Public Defender for the very first time. We spent several hours speaking with the agency’s Chief of Trial Technology and the mother of a detained individual whose hearing had been repeatedly postponed. Since that day, we have centered the voices of public defenders and their clients in every aspect of building JusticeText. We created the first prototype in direct collaboration with a group of ten attorneys in Chicago and have since then recruited the support of hundreds of public defenders – from well-resourced agencies in urban centers to small legal aid nonprofits in rural counties.

We organize monthly feedback sessions during which our users share recommendations on how we can better serve their needs. I have also built a network of mentors – including legal advocates and formerly incarcerated individuals – who have helped me develop a product roadmap and scale our outreach.

Technology has made reams of information available as novel forms of evidence. From forensic discovery to body-worn cameras, prosecution and defense counsel alike are adjusting to new technological realities. However, law enforcement and prosecution possess structural advantages in the form of significant public funding and far-reaching legal discretion.  

The relative disadvantages of public defenders have culminated in a “tech gap” that contravenes the principles of equal justice. Prosecution has greater legal powers, including warrants and court orders, to compel companies to grant them access to digital evidence, and they can utilize forensics technologies to assist with digital investigations. Additionally, markets offering access to password-protected smartphones and computers cater almost exclusively to law enforcement. 

At JusticeText, we believe defenders deserve to utilize technology to its fullest extent for their indigent clients. 92% of the 109 public defenders we surveyed indicated that they utilize an entirely manual process to review audiovisual evidence. We have developed a new product that levels the playing field by leveraging machine learning to convert digital discovery into a text-based representation.

Over the course of the past eight months, 500 users from ten different public defense agencies have tested our product through structured pilot programs. They have offered us valuable feedback that has inspired the implementation of context-specific features, substantial UI redesigns, and a more comprehensive understanding of the potential use cases for our software. 

We currently have 110 monthly active users on JusticeText, and attorneys have uploaded 3,000+ hours of discovery to the platform. We have been extremely intentional about driving user engagement through onboarding sessions, personalized outreach, and customer support. We recently secured a $160K annual contract with the Virginia Indigent Defense Commission and will be onboarding 125 lawyers across the state onto JusticeText next month. 

Our primary goal is to focus on scaling our solution nationwide and deepening our existing partnerships with offices like the Georgia Justice Project, Orange County Public Defender, and Kansas Federal Public Defender.

Our solution is powered by a collection of cloud based services, javascript libraries, and automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology. Specifically, we use: 

• AWS for our machine learning, file storage, user directory management, file transcoding needs, and hosting
• Heroku to further facilitate our microservice architecture
• React.js, Node.js, and Express.js along with dozens of open source libraries to handle, process, and deliver the data users upload and the data we produce.
• Ffmpeg library to help produce video clips
• Modern html5, MongoDB, and dynamoDB to build modern user interfaces with data persistence

 Our React.js web application allows users to upload files which are then stored in S3, transcoded by Elastic Transcoder where a thumbnail image is produced. After which it is sent to AWS transcribe. When a user logs in to their dashboard, they can see their previously uploaded files. When they open the file, they are taken to our editor where they can edit the transcript, create notes and annotations, and produce video clips in preparation for trial.

We currently serve 500 indigent defense attorneys who represent 270,000 individuals annually across 8 states. Within one year, we would like to grow 500% and serve 2,500 indigent defense attorneys and an estimated 1.35 million criminal defendants. Our five-year goal is to work with all 15,000 indigent defense attorneys in the United States and ensure expedited, improved outcomes for the 5.6 million low-income individuals who are charged with a crime every year.  

We are working to achieve the following impact goals over the next five years:

• Reduce the amount of time public defense agencies spend reviewing audio and video discovery by 50%, thus freeing up valuable attorney time to focus on other case-related priorities. 
• Reduce pre-trial detention time by 10% by allowing public defenders to assess the strength of a case more quickly and identify potentially exonerating evidence. 
• Ensurer more advantageous, restorative outcomes for indigent defendants, especially given that 90-95% of criminal cases are resolved through plea bargains today. 

We are going county by county, state by state to establish trust and partnerships with public defense agencies nationwide. Our technology is easily scalable, and have collaborated with a number of national organizations like the National Defender Investigator Association and National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers to execute on our go-to-market strategy. 

Our immediate priority at the moment is to acquire more users and offer high-quality training to ensure that they are able to maximally utilize JusticeText. We have already begun to see results. The Chief Information Officer of the Colorado Office of the Public Defender recently shared feedback he has received from attorneys statewide, “JusticeText works very well for processing jail calls. People feel like it’s helping them absorb their discovery faster. Also, Devshi and others at JusticeText have been really responsive and helpful.”

According to the national standards set by the Justice Policy Institute, only 21% of county-based public defender offices have enough attorneys to effectively handle their caseloads. As a direct consequence of the high volumes of indigent defender caseloads, individual public defenders are often obligated to assume responsibility for far more clients than they can be reasonably expected to protect.  

We have identified five key impact metrics which reflect the core value proposition of JusticeText. We ask attorneys to reflect on the first four statements in our end-of-pilot survey and will include the fifth question 6 months down the road.

• Using JusticeText helps me be more effective at my job.
• Using JusticeText helps save me time.
• Using JusticeText helps me feel more prepared to accurately advise clients about the strength of the case against them.
• Using JusticeText helps strengthen my ability to get better plea offers because of my familiarity with the evidence.
• Using JusticeText increases my ability to state “ready for trial” on the first trial date.

Through our product, we intend to reduce the amount of time that is wastefully spent in processing video evidence to strengthen the capacity of our courts to deliver just legal representation. We will be utilizing our pilot studies to better quantify how JusticeText improves justice outcomes.

1. Navigating government procurement can be a lengthy process, particularly if the agency decides to release a Request for Proposal (RFP).
2. One of the primary challenges we have run into is that most major speech-to-text engines are not sufficiently trained on African American Vernacular English (AAVE) speech data. As a result, the accuracy of our automatically generated transcripts is lower when processing non-standard dialects than Standard American English (SAE), thus constituting a potential risk.
3. If public defenders agencies experience budget cuts, then they can be expected to roll back on technology investments.
4. Digital discovery in the criminal justice system features a wide array of proprietary file types from organizations like Global Tel Link, Evidence Reviewer, WatchGuard Technologies, and more. Supporting some of the less common file types can be a challenge.
5. There is a dearth of high-quality datasets for Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications in the legal world. 

My co-founder Leslie and I lived in Chicago during the age of an unprecedented wave of majority-black school closures, of the murder of Laquan McDonald, and of the relentless expansion of the second largest municipal police department in the country. While navigating the city through the lens of computer scientists, we realized the extent to which the set of priorities driving technological development fail to be inclusive of the most marginalized communities. It was then that we made a commitment to leverage our technical backgrounds in furtherance of racial justice efforts in the city we had grown to care so deeply for.

Leslie and I, as a Black man and South Asian woman, are both young, underrepresented members of the technology community who actively seek to advance racial justice through our work. I believe we have the opportunity to showcase the potential for technology and innovation to alleviate inequalities rather than exacerbate them. 

We have previously cultivated extensive experience as software engineers at organizations like Google Brain, Facebook, Microsoft Research, Stanford Law, and DeepMind. As a highly technical co-founding team, we have been able to rapidly execute on our product vision over the past two years. We were also most recently named to the 2021 Forbes 30 Under 30 List for Social Impact. 

Devshi Mehrotra, CEO: https://www.linkedin.com/in/de...

Leslie Jones-Dove, CTO: https://www.linkedin.com/in/le... 

We have established formal partnerships with a number of important national and local lawyers’ associations to help market JusticeText to a broader community of indigent defense attorneys. We will be attending public defenders conferences, organizing webinars, investing in digital marketing, and conducting cold outreach to connect with our target customers.

National partners:

• National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL)
• National Association for Public Defense (NAPD)
• National Legal Aid and Defender Association (NLADA)
• National Defender Investigator Association
• Gideon’s Promise

Local partners:

• State-administered indigent defense systems
• County-level public defense offices 
• Criminal defense bar associations
• Assigned counsel programs

We are focusing our energy on conducting outreach to three main groups: public defense agencies, individual criminal defense attorneys, and criminal defense bar associations. We hope that individual attorneys can help evangelize their colleagues and that bar associations can serve as channel partners if we offer our product at a discounted rate to their membership.

Discovery laws in the United States are deeply flawed and often place criminal defendants at a disadvantage. Not only do district attorneys have disproportionate say in what information is shared and at what times, but it is not uncommon for critical discovery to be shared with defense counsel a mere days before trial. Social justice advocates have been protesting for open access to recorded police interactions and interrogations for years. However, more recordings mean little without infrastructure to store, catalog, review, and transfer the data.

Immediately, we are working to put power back in the hands of public defenders by developing technology specifically tailored to their workflow. Long-term, we intend to use our work to advocate for fairer discovery legislation, greater investment in anti-racist technology, and resource parity in indigent defense.

The Pozen Social Innovation Prize would enable our team to hire a sales development representative to scale our government partnerships efforts to the next level.