The State Attorney’s office for the Eighth Judicial Circuit is transitioning to a digital forensic software called NICE Justice. The software replaces the Equity in Sentencing Analysis System used in the previous year.
Alvin Wellington Barlow, partner for Technologies for Justice, said the Equity in Sentencing Analysis System (ESAS) gathers previous cases for similar offenses and compares them to the charges being made.
“You can see patterns through the statistics as to which dispositions are outliers or within the normal averages for each particular charge,” Barlow said. “Burglaries might have a certain average in Gainesville, but that average might be different in Tampa. Each case has its own data.”
ESAS obtains sentencing data from all judicial circuits and counties throughout Florida, and goes as far back as 1998, Barlow said.
Public defender offices in Tallahassee, Tampa and Ponte Vedra currently use the software, Barlow said.
If entire offices don’t purchase ESAS, individual lawyers can purchase a year subscription or perform a custom search from Technologies for Justice for a single case. A one-year subscription for an individual lawyer is $1,100. However, there are discounts for Florida Bar or Florida Association of Criminal Defense members.
While each case is different, Barlow said he could run up to 12 searches for one case. Although, he said he tries to only work on one case a day.
The data compiled by ESAS doesn’t take any subjective criteria into consideration, Barlow said.
“It’s supposed to not matter what the race of the person is, what matters is whether it’s a first offense or second offense,” he said. “You’re looking at objective data to determine what should be done. That’s supposed to exclude subjective factors like race.”
While subjective factors in cases may come into play, such as a prosecutor's relationship with a defense attorney, ESAS data aren’t involved with such factors, Barlow said.
Brian Kramer, state attorney for the Eighth Judicial Circuit, said the original cost to integrate ESAS was $73,000. Both the public defender and the state attorney’s offices share a case management system, Kramer said.
The original contract slated ESAS to be used in both offices from July 1, 2023, to June 30, 2024, according to public records.
Kramer said he deployed it to a test group of lawyers, but it wasn’t deployed to all lawyers before the contract expired.
“I think that it [ESAS] did what it was supposed to do,” he said.
After June 30, Kramer said ESAS wasn’t renewed because of budget restrictions and a need for digital forensic software.
“I have essentially a very limited financial budget,” he said. “The rate of downloading digital evidence has increased.”
Digital forensic evidence, such as documents, media, messages and transactions, are used in both criminal and civil investigations. Kramer said the state attorney’s office downloaded 26,000 individual pieces of digital forensic evidence per month, and he employed nine full-time staff to download, digest and analyze digital evidence.
“Our priority had to shift to devoting the limited resources we had to digital forensic evidence management system,” he said. “We have to make choices on what we can provide.”
For example, in a car accident, forensic evidence would include all body cameras and car cameras from the police officers present and any traffic cameras or business surveillance cameras that caught the accident. If each video was 45 minutes long, lawyers may have to watch hours of video to understand everything.
With the NICE Justice software system, Kramer said lawyers can now combine digital evidence in a timeline to watch everything simultaneously with an included transcript, which “increases the efficiency of how [lawyers] review and digest digital forensic evidence.”
Kramer said the state attorney’s office signed a three-year contract with NICE Justice, and the software costs about $130,000 a year. However, Kramer said he is on the lookout for the next competitive product.
Kramer said the NICE Justice software is already installed and built into servers, and he is hoping testing will open by late August and the software will open for general prosecutors by September.
