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Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County looks to NICE Justice to streamline the criminal justice process, reduce postponements, and free up attorneys to prosecute more cases

August 28, 2023 08:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

HOBOKEN, N.J.— NICE (Nasdaq: NICE) today announced that the Office of the District Attorney of Allegheny County (which includes the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania metropolitan area) will be deploying NICE Justice, one of the AI-powered solutions in NICE’s Evidencentral platform, to streamline its entire criminal justice process. Through its deployment of NICE Justice, the Allegheny County District Attorney’s Office is looking to improve how it manages a growing influx of digital evidence across every touchpoint, from intake to discovery. The Allegheny County DA serves a population of 1.2 million people and is the second county District Attorney’s office in Pennsylvania to select NICE Justice.

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 capabilities for face detection and redaction, video and audio transcription, and finding evidence connections.

William Petulla, Chief Trial Deputy for the Allegheny County DA’s Office, said, “The explosion of digital evidence has been an enormous help in prosecuting cases, but it has come with a number of challenges as well. Just the sheer volume of evidence has led to challenges in timely discovery and disclosure and relegated our attorneys to the role of makeshift IT specialists. NICE Justice will help us better manage the growing influx of digital evidence, provide digital discovery in a timely fashion, and free up our assistant district attorneys to focus on prosecuting our high volume of cases.”

Rebecca D. Spangler, First Assistant District Attorney for the Allegheny County DA’s Office, said, “We have a sizable number of cases that were postponed due to delays in processing digital evidence. With NICE Justice, we’ll be able to streamline the entire process of managing digital evidence, from intake to discovery. When we’re able to eliminate postponements by making the system more efficient as a whole, that’s good for everyone.”

The Allegheny County District Attorney’s Office employs 127 attorneys who manage 35,000 cases annually. As case volumes have grown, so too has digital evidence. The Office receives evidence from close to 200 different police departments, which each have their own methods of sharing it. Evidence arrives on hard drives and CDs, via Dropbox and email, and sometimes needs to be manually downloaded and re-uploaded into other systems.

NICE Justice consolidates evidence intake through one system to expedite digital discovery. Police departments can upload and share all types of digital evidence, including video, through a unified online portal. Evidence is automatically deposited into the correct digital case file folder. NICE Justice also speeds up trial preparation and disclosure, with AI-powered transcription and redaction software.

Chris Wooten, Executive Vice President, NICE, said, “As digital evidence grows, the entire criminal justice system is becoming bottlenecked. NICE Justice is an innovative solution to this digital evidence challenge. By combining AI and automation, NICE Justice liberates everyone from the manual work of managing digital evidence – police departments, public defenders, prosecutors, and courts – so they can deliver swifter justice and get to the truth faster.”

On Thursday, April 13 the jury found Christian Bey guilty of murder of the 1st degree in the killing of Calvin Hall, an off-duty Pittsburgh Police Officer. The jury’s decision comes after a month long trial. For the Post Gazette’s coverage of the story, please visit the Post Gazette website.