Posted June 2, 2021

JusticeText is pleased to announce that we will be working with the Georgia Justice Project (GJP) to support their criminal defense practice. GJP employs a holistic defense model to represent over 100 low-income criminal defendants across DeKalb and Fulton County every year.

"It is amazing to see how the Georgia Justice Project invests in building long-term relationships with the individuals it represents, from pre-trial to parole and re-entry. We are proud to be working together with their team of advocates to expand access to indigent defense services in Metro Atlanta," said Devshi Mehrotra, CEO and co-founder of JusticeText.

Body-worn camera footage, interrogation videos, and jail call recordings have become a ubiquitous source of digital evidence in Georgia. JusticeText was specially designed to make the pre-trial preparation process easier by generating searchable, automated transcripts of audio and video. "JusticeText allows us to do better work and more work for each of our clients because we don't have to focus so much on just listening to videos and jail phone calls for hours at a time," said Rachel Holmes, Managing Director at GJP. "We currently have a case with well over 100 jail calls, and using JusticeText has given us a way to decide which ones are important much more quickly."

While jail call conversations are recorded as a public safety measure, the indiscriminate surveillance of all detainees is a violation of due process - especially for individuals who are only in jail because they cannot afford to post bail. It is then all the more important that indigent defense attorneys and their clients are given access to the recordings in a timely fashion.

"I've got clients in custody, and I spend hours allowing them to listen to recordings while at the jail. But what I was able to do last week was also take the transcription I created using JusticeText," said Holmes. "To be able to leave something with my client that he could continue to review was extremely helpful. I had not been able to do that before."

We at JusticeText are excited to see GJP continue to not only provide robust legal services in their community but also advocate for broader systemic reform within the criminal legal system.