Using Artificial Intelligence in Criminal Defense
You have an officer on the stand who says he complied with department procedure when he seized evidence. When you searched your discovery, you don’t find any forms or reports completed by the officer.
You’re pretty sure that can’t be right, but the Buffalo Police Manual is 924 pages long and rabbit holes are dangerous in our line of work. But wouldn’t it be nice to list all the forms he should have completed that you don’t have?
Here’s an efficient and effective way to gather the information you need to confirm your hunch using AI:
Step one: Get a Google Notebook LM account. (https://notebooklm.google.com/) Start with the free plan. It’s fine for this. You can use your gmail account if you have one.
Step two: Find a copy of the Buffalo Police Manual of Procedures online. Here is one copy from 2022: https://www.bpdny.org/DocumentCenter/View/189/BPD-MANUAL-OF-PROCEDURES
Step three: Upload it to a new notebook in your new Notebook LM account. There is an option to simply link your notebook to the URL for the manual directly, but I got inconsistent and slower results when I did it that way.
Step four: In your Notebook, enter the prompt: “make a table of all forms an officer should use when he seizes property”
If you’ve done it right, the response should include about 14 or 15 forms, some of which you’ve never heard of and none of which were in the discovery provided by the prosecutor.
The results aren’t reliable enough to rely on blindly. For example, you should verify the results using the most up to date BPD manual available here:
https://public.powerdms.com/BuffaloCity/tree/documents/1890517.
But you have the citations and the sources that would have taken hours to gather on your own.
Here are some other prompts to consider:
“What records does an officer create when he seizes property?”
“When can an officer impound and tow a vehicle and what forms are completed when that happens?”
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