Last spring, Devshi Mehrotra and Leslie Jones-Dove were graduating seniors at the University of Chicago.
Both computer science majors, they were taking a course about entrepreneurship and technology when they came up with the idea for a startup that improves the criminal justice system by making public defenders' lives a little easier.
Their company, JusticeText, is a software platform that allows public defenders to quickly and efficiently sift through video footage that can be imperative in how they build a case and defend a client.
“[We] were thinking about more socially-oriented projects when a lot of the projects being presented in the class were like food apps and food delivery … and first-world problems,” Jones-Dove said. “We wanted to focus on making more of an impact in our immediate community.”
Many public defenders' offices around the country lack the technical infrastructure to process high volumes of video evidence, such as body camera footage and videotaped interrogations. And because more than 80 percent of criminal cases involve video evidence, public defenders, which are often already juggling multiple cases at once, sometimes don't have the time to watch hours of videos.
“To adequately defend your client, you have to watch all of it, and this might be 12 to 16 hours worth of video,” Jones-Dove said.
By using JusticeText, public defenders can upload video files to the startup's platform and receive accurate transcriptions of each video. To do this, JusticeText uses speech-to-text machine learning algorithms to transcribe the video and creates a searchable transcription alongside the video.
The software, which is sold to justice departments on a subscription basis, can also automatically identify when different individuals are speaking in videos, and allows users to grab and export specific clips that could be useful in a trial.
JusticeText began piloting the tech with its first client, the Cook County Public Defender's Office, last year. Through that relationship, Joel Simberg, the office’s chief of trial technology, joined Justice Text to help the founders grow the startup.
“He’s been really, really helpful,” Mehrotra said. “He’s been one of the biggest advocates for our product when we want to do outreach to other offices.”
JusticeText is also operating pilot programs with public defender’s offices in Kentucky, Oakland, New Orleans, and Monroe County, near Rochester, New York.
The Institute of Politics, a UChicago program founded by David Axelrod, a political consultant and the former chief strategist for President Barack Obama, provided JusticeText a small grant last year while the founders were still students.
“[JusticeText] allows us to combine our identity of computer scientists and people who want to make a change through activism and advocacy,” Mehrotra said. “We’ve learned a lot about the criminal justice system through this work and we’re really excited about continuing to use this project as a means to advocate for more structural change.”
