NICE Justice selected by three DA offices for digital evidence management

NICE today announced that the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office in California, the Calcasieu Parish District Attorney's Office, and the McHenry County (IL) State's Attorney's Office have selected NICE Justice, one of the AI-powered solutions in NICE’s Evidencentral platform, to fulfill their vision of centralizing management of digital evidence under one platform and removing the hurdles involved in managing digital evidence.

The cloud-based NICE Justice solution digitally transforms how district attorneys and office staff receive, interact with, manage, and share digital evidence. Freed from dealing with discs, drives, emails, and logging into multiple systems to manage and prepare evidence, attorneys and staff can focus on building and presenting compelling cases. NICE Justice also features built-in AI and automation capabilities for object detection, automated case building, video and audio transcription and translation, optical character recognition (OCR), analytics, and finding evidence connections.

Monterey County DA Office places focus on digital evidence

The Monterey County District Attorney’s Office is the fourth prosecutor’s office in California to digitally transform evidence management with NICE Justice. Its staff of 57 attorneys and 27 investigators reviews over 15,000 felony and misdemeanor cases annually. The Office receives evidence from 15 primary municipal law enforcement agencies, several correctional institutions, and other city, state, and federal partners. Evidence is received in a myriad of ways—via email links, on CDs, DVDs, thumb drives, and external hard drives, and via other evidence systems—requiring staff to manually and repeatedly scan, download, and upload files into various shared drives and systems.

Ryan J. McGuirk, Chief Investigator for the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office, said, “With the increasing use of body-worn and in-car cameras, cell phones, video, and home surveillance, digital evidence is now a key component in almost every case. Our goal is to integrate all this evidence into one system. NICE Justice will help us realize this goal by providing a single, centralized platform for collecting, analyzing, organizing, sharing, and storing all digital evidence.”

Chris Wooten, Executive Vice President, NICE, commented, “We’re thrilled to build on our momentum of helping prosecutors digitally transform their evidence management with the addition of the Monterey County DA. With the breadth and scope of digital evidence growing exponentially, NICE Justice helps prosecutors get to the truth faster.”

McHenry County seeks more efficient cooperation with law enforcement

Through its deployment of NICE Justice, the McHenry County State's Attorney's Office is aiming to work more efficiently with its law enforcement partners in the pursuit of justice for victims. Led by State’s Attorney Randi Freese, the McHenry County State’s Attorney’s Office is the third State’s Attorney’s office in the state of Illinois to select NICE Justice for digital evidence management transformation.

The McHenry County State's Attorney's Office oversees approximately 3,000 criminal cases annually, working with the Illinois State Police and thirty-six other law enforcement partners.

Randi Freese, State’s Attorney for McHenry County, said, “Our goal is the ethical pursuit of justice. We have a duty to seek the truth above all else, and that truth is often revealed through digital evidence. However, as our law enforcement partners adopt more digital systems, digital evidence is becoming increasingly difficult to collect, analyze, understand, and share through conventional means. NICE Justice is going to help us find the truth in digital evidence faster and work more efficiently with our law enforcement partners as we pursue justice for victims.”

Jorge Enciso, Legal Technology Division Supervisor, McHenry County State's Attorney's Office, added, “The influx of digital evidence has been astronomical. But beyond the quantity, the size of the files is also challenging. It’s not uncommon for a case to involve twenty video files, many with high-quality 4K resolution. These video files usually have to be transcoded and manually uploaded. NICE Justice will result in a major quality-of-life improvement for our attorneys and staff because it will automatically do the transcoding for us and eliminate the need to manually upload digital evidence.”

Police department investigators will be able to use NICE Justice’s secure portal to upload evidence to the cloud, where it will be automatically deposited into digital case folders and become immediately accessible to assigned attorneys.

“Our office especially appreciates the AI capabilities and investigative tools that are built into NICE Justice, such as the ability to index and transform PDF files into searchable documents, evidence tagging, and transcription. Making these capabilities universally available to attorneys will deepen the quality of our investigations and prosecutions,” added Enciso.

Calcasieu Parish is Louisiana's first DA office to implement NICE Justice

Chris Wooten, Executive Vice President, NICE, said, “NICE Justice helps all types of criminal justice agencies, from DAs and public defenders to police departments and correctional institutions, achieve cost savings and timelier justice through digital transformation. As the first District Attorney’s office in Louisiana to deploy NICE Justice for digital transformation, the Calcasieu Parish District Attorney's Office is a true trailblazer.”

Calcasieu Parish District Attorney Stephen C. Dwight said, “This is a huge step forward for our office in terms of modernizing how we manage digital evidence. By investing in NICE Justice, we will be at the forefront of efficient prosecution in the state. Not only will NICE Justice improve efficiency and reduce costs, but it will also boost staff morale. Our attorneys and legal staff will have more time to focus on the rewarding work of achieving justice, rather than spending time on the manual tasks of managing digital evidence. We hope that other district attorney's offices in Louisiana will follow suit."

Serving an estimated 200,000 Parish residents, the 130 staff members of the Calcasieu Parish District Attorney's Office handle approximately 15,000 cases annually. Similar to other prosecuting agencies, the office is being inundated with digital evidence. The Calcasieu Parish District Attorney's Office intakes digital evidence from a dozen different police, sheriff, and other departments and funds the cost of providing hard drives, thumb drives, and other media to these agencies for evidence sharing. When evidence arrives, it must be manually downloaded and uploaded into other systems. NICE Justice eliminates these costs and inefficiencies by providing one unified portal through which law enforcement agencies can securely upload digital evidence. Discovery can be shared with the defense through a seamless, trackable, digital process as well.

Located in Lake Charles, Louisiana, the Calcasieu Parish District Attorney's Office is vulnerable to tropical weather and flooding events. Storing digital evidence on on-premise servers poses a risk. NICE Justice offers a secure cloud storage solution for digital evidence, which is also scalable to accommodate increasing volumes of data.

“In addition to safeguarding our data, NICE Justice leverages AI and automation to offload much of the legwork, costs, and complexities of managing digital evidence. This will allow our staff to get back to the work of pursuing justice and prosecuting cases,” said Scott Hunsaker, Director of IT for the Calcasieu Parish District Attorney’s Office.