Alister Inc/Blockchain Of Evidence (BOE)

A conservative estimate gathered from various news and scholarly resources suggests that approximately 20,000 people in the U.S. are falsely accused, convicted, and incarcerated every year. 

Innocent people are losing their entire lives to false imprisonment as the average term served by those falsely convicted is 10 years. That’s a decade in the life of a brother, sister, father, mother, colleague, or student who will not be allowed to contribute fully to society once falsely convicted of a crime. 

Even after release, convicts struggle throughout their lives to gain and keep opportunities those without a criminal history are provided. These false convictions are contributing to the breakdown of trust within our US criminal justice system.

The current system is not working and has resulted in so many false convictions that the Governor of California put a moratorium on the Death Penalty based on a National Academy of Sciences report proving, “1 out of every 25 people on Death Row are innocent.”

The BoE concept is a new type of booking system that moves the process of officially booking evidence to the scene, immediately upon collection by authorized personnel.

This concept will create a transparent, trusted booking system that will save valuable time for all those involved in collecting, testing, and reviewing evidence, as well as prosecuting or defending criminal cases. This will empower the community, including Officers and Deputies. The results in a reduction in fatigue, complacency, and workload by automating evidence collection as well as improving its accuracy.

Adoption of BOE will eventually lead to both Prosecution and Defense stipulating to the integrity of evidence. This reduces evidence suppression hearings, which results in recovered time returned to both sides to contribute to social and economic recovery by their constituents. This could save billions of taxpayer dollars currently spent on the arrest, conviction, and incarceration of innocent persons.

Interns from CSU Sacramento's Management Information System program worked with us to build our backend as a class project. A professional programmer then tested functionality, integrity, and security of our backend, proving our concept. 

We now need to develop, build, test and deploy a frontend proof of concept to be tested end-to-end with our backend in a usability lab or field environment. We also need to research how best to build a secure smartphone app for use by evidence technicians and police officers in the field collecting evidence. 

Finally, we will need the help of a representative number of police agencies and evidence collection laboratories to help us research the best point to overlay our technology in their evidence management system. The MIT-Solve Accelerator program will help us to employ developers to build, test, deploy, configure, and maintain the system through minimum viable product and beta stages to production deployment.