Tech Talk: Tech For Criminal Justice

During this session we will hear from Code for BTV volunteers who are developing software that supports the criminal justice system

CourtBot is a text message notification system intended to allow anyone to receive automatic court date attendance reminders, for the express purpose of keeping people with court dates from missing them and suffering terrible consequences when they do

Technology: Code for BTV is working with Code for Tulsa, another Code for America brigade, to implement a CourtBot solution that relies on Code for Tulsa to provide the text message interface (hosted on AWS), and Code for BTV to provide an API to access court calendar data. Code for BTV is using Python to scrape the court calendar data from the VT judiciary website, and reformatting it to JSON that can be stored on Github.

More about the CourtBot project
In many states, including Vermont, there is no system in place to automatically reminder people of upcoming court dates. While for many situations missing an appointment is unfortunate, for those with at least criminal or civil court hearings that they must attend, the result of missing the hearing can be disastrous.

For criminal court, no matter the specific infraction - say criminally speeding at 85 miles per hour on the interstate - if you have a hearing, and you miss it, you will automatically be arrested and placed in jail. The repercussions on your record can be long lasting and can haunt you when trying to get a job, a loan, or perhaps retain custody of your child. The repercussions for the taxpayers is that society effectively has to pay hundreds of dollars a day to house you.

For civil court, the result can be equally problematic, but may depend on the type of hearing. One example is when a landlord and tenant are involved in a dispute over whether a tenant can be evicted. No matter if the landlord is in the wrong, if the tenant misses the court hearing, the landlord will be allowed to immediately evict the tenant.

CourtBot is a project of the brigade network that has already been implemented in numerous states around the country (Georgia, New Mexico, Alaska, and Oklahoma), to great effect. The software simply runs as a text message system you can subscribe to. When you give it a docket number, it sends you reminders a few days before the hearing, and on the day of the hearing, to help you get there in time. In order to do this it interfaces with the regularly updated court calendar data, and keeps track of a list of text message numbers to send updates and reminders to for any given docket.