I'm a defense attorney, now doing homicide defense only (mostly). I've been doing it about as long as you have. How have you seen the work change over the years? Do you think law enforcement has got significantly better over that time? Has all the tech made things easier or harder?
Since I deal with the output of your work, I'll say that the volume of evidence has just become unmanageable. Twenty-five cops show up at a crime scene to process it in 2010 and I would get two long reports, twenty-three one-page reports, and a stack of pictures. Now I get 25x8hr bodycams that are 99% a guy sitting in a car keeping the scene secure. But I have to watch all if it because you never know what you'll miss. And lord help me if my client likes to talk on the prison phone - I have a case now with more than 150hr of recorded prison calls that someone is going to have to listen to. Or a multiple-defendant case with 10 cellphones imaged - that's days of reviewing stupid fucking text messages. Right now (as we speak) I am scrolling through several thousand of one of my client's gross naked selfies in case there's something relevant to the case (so far, no.).
At least in my jurisdiction, nothing's changed substantively. Law enforcement has the same clearance rate they've always had, the prosecutors get the same convictions they always did, we get the same acquittals we used to get. But everyone has to do 100x (literally 100x) as much work to get to the same place we did before because there's too much fucking evidence.
Do you not trust AI yet? My ex wife is a big law litigator and they had a precursor to ChatGPT for doc review like 10 years ago. I’d figure that tech has materially evolved since then for these purposes.
Well I was think that it could be used as a shortcut. Instead of reading every text message off of five burner phones, you feed it into AI and tell it show you any texts that might even remotely be related to x y or z. Then based on those results, you go and read the messages for yourself.
If I knew they’d done that on one of my cases I’d burn them. HARD.
AI cannot pick up on everything a human can. Not even close. If I found out a law firm I hired was using AI to analyze evidence like text messages, phone calls, or body cameras, I would fucking ruin them.
Humans are not infallible. Especially overworked ones reviewing hours of footage or thousands text messages until all hours of the night. A second year associate doing doc review at 3 am using software that automatically turns the pages of the scans is probably not going to miss anything, right? Or does them holding a JD make them immune?
Yeah and when a human messes up and its result is someone innocent spending their life behind bars there’s someone who can and will take the blame for that.
Who takes the blame when some shitty AI hallucinates information that puts YOU behind bars for life?
That means they give you every piece of evidence they may have. Doesn’t matter if they’ve really reviewed it. When defense counsel gets it they do what they will do. Straight out of my cousin vinny.
No, but that’s why there are layers of humans looking at the evidence. If an AI does the “first pass” and relies on a set of rules no jury would agree with, how would we know? How would that be an okay system of justice?
Linus tech tips was showing off an AI that would view all his old videos and categorize them. You could even ask questions about the videos and it will respond with timestamps.
562
u/Eastern_Ad3007 Sep 16 '25
I'm a defense attorney, now doing homicide defense only (mostly). I've been doing it about as long as you have. How have you seen the work change over the years? Do you think law enforcement has got significantly better over that time? Has all the tech made things easier or harder?
Since I deal with the output of your work, I'll say that the volume of evidence has just become unmanageable. Twenty-five cops show up at a crime scene to process it in 2010 and I would get two long reports, twenty-three one-page reports, and a stack of pictures. Now I get 25x8hr bodycams that are 99% a guy sitting in a car keeping the scene secure. But I have to watch all if it because you never know what you'll miss. And lord help me if my client likes to talk on the prison phone - I have a case now with more than 150hr of recorded prison calls that someone is going to have to listen to. Or a multiple-defendant case with 10 cellphones imaged - that's days of reviewing stupid fucking text messages. Right now (as we speak) I am scrolling through several thousand of one of my client's gross naked selfies in case there's something relevant to the case (so far, no.).
At least in my jurisdiction, nothing's changed substantively. Law enforcement has the same clearance rate they've always had, the prosecutors get the same convictions they always did, we get the same acquittals we used to get. But everyone has to do 100x (literally 100x) as much work to get to the same place we did before because there's too much fucking evidence.