The summer before Devshi Mehrotra’s senior year at the University of Chicago, she read The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. After reading the book, she felt both angry and inspired to think about how she could be a change agent in her community.
“Reading about the public defense system, I felt I had to do something. Of course, I didn’t know how I could address all the systemic issues,” said Mehrotra, SB ’19, SM ’19. “But, there are other issues, like public defenders being overburdened with caseloads and an infrastructure that isn’t allowing them to do a better job. That’s an area where I could try to do something.”
Five months before graduating with degrees in computer science, she and fellow UChicago College student Leslie Jones-Dove, SB ’19, founded JusticeText, an audiovisual evidence management platform designed to produce fairer criminal justice outcomes by expediting the review of police body camera footage, interrogation videos, jail calls, and more.
