JusticeText Inc. received a $300,000 grant from Dream.org for its efforts to advance criminal justice reform, boosting its funding total since its start in 2019 to about $3 million.
The Irvine-based startup develops software that takes hours of recorded evidence from body camera footage, interrogation videos and jail calls, and turns them into organized transcripts.
JusticeText aims to help under-resourced public defenders manage their caseloads so they can better serve disadvantaged communities.
Public defenders are an often-overlooked part of the criminal justice system, says Devshi Mehrotra, co-founder and chief executive of JusticeText.
“They are truly that last line of defense for so many individuals, and they have the power to redirect and transform people’s lives before they’re irreversibly harmed by incarceration,” Mehrotra told the Business Journal.
JusticeText was one of three winners of Dream.org’s inaugural Justice Innovation Prize.Five finalists chosen from hundreds of applicants pitched in front of a live audience and panel of judges at the social impact investing conference SOCAP23 held in San Francisco late last month.
Dream.org, a nonprofit organization fighting mass incarceration, received a $1 million donation from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in January to support companies disrupting the prison industry.
“The prison industry is one of the most broken systems in the country, and we want to encourage innovators to jump in and try to make it better,” Dream.org CEO Nisha Anand said.
Machine Learning Approach
With JusticeText, attorneys can upload hours of audiovisual evidence and have it transcribed within a couple of minutes.
JusticeText’s software leverages machine learning to timestamp key moments like when someone was read their Miranda warnings or placed under arrest.
JusticeText saves attorneys hours of manually sifting through high volumes of data by pointing out these relevant portions of the transcript.
Mehrotra was transparent about the limitations of JusticeText’s algorithm when it comes to accuracy and encourages users to review and make edits where necessary.
“Speech recognition technology has come a long way in the past four years, but it will never be perfect,” Mehrotra said.
Factors such as background noise and police sirens may affect the quality of the transcript.
As a solution, JusticeText indicates how confident it is in the accuracy of the transcript at the top of every file.
“We make it clear that this is a helpful starting point, but by no means a final product.”
Public Defenders
Mehrotra knew she wanted to design JusticeText specifically for public defenders.
Roughly four out of five people facing criminal charges rely on public defenders because they can’t afford a lawyer, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, leading to higher caseloads for public defenders.
“These incredibly overworked public defenders don’t have the bandwidth to look with a fine-tooth comb through all of this footage,” Mehrotra said.
Many look to reform police, prisons and prosecutors to improve the prison industry, but Mehrotra believes public defenders are “an absolute vital equity that we need to be investing in.”
This year, JusticeText has rolled out its software to 100 attorneys in Massachusetts and Kentucky where there are statewide public defender systems.
Since its launch in 2021, JusticeText is currently being used in 50 public defender offices across the country.
The grant from Dream.org will help JusticeText grow its team of eight and expand its offerings to more rural public defender agencies who may not have the same access to these technologies, Mehrotra said.
Decarceration
Mehrotra, who grew up in Irvine, was a senior studying computer science at the University of Chicago when she came up with the idea for JusticeText with co-founder Leslie Jones-Dove.
After the police killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014, the two students noticed an increase in the use of technologies to carry out more arrests.
“We wanted to find ways in which we could leverage our background as technologists to work towards decarceration,” Mehrotra said.
Mehrotra and Jones-Dove partnered together on a project focused on addressing inequities in the criminal justice system for a 12-week entrepreneurship course.
Mehrotra said they reached out to their local public defender’s office and worked with them to develop an initial prototype.
Despite going their separate ways after graduating, the two committed to JusticeText full time around the same time as the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement and growing national awareness of racial justice.
What initially started as a school project four years ago is now a startup company that’s raised around $3 million in funding to date.
JusticeText previously raised a $2.2 million seed round last September from multiple investors including Bloomberg Beta, co-founder of LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Grammy Award-winning musician John Legend, among others.
“I’m excited to see how this ecosystem continues to evolve and how more innovators and technologists find ways to make impact in their own unique ways,” Mehrotra said.
