Race-blind charging

Race-blind Charging ensures prosecutorial decisions are made without racial bias, whether conscious or unconscious. By removing race-related information from the charging process, the feature aims to enhance public trust in the legal system.

User responsibilities

Race-blind Charging impacts users during case creation and initial charging decisions. To make this easier, the system provides two queues to manage the cases:

  1. Race Blind Cases Received: all non-race-blind exempt cases are added to this queue. When you create a case, designated users review and prepare the case for an initial charging decision. The most important task for these users is to ensure documents are redacted. The case is only removed from this queue when an initial charging decision is made. This allows more documents to be added to the case as needed.

  2. Race Blind Charging Review: once redacted documents are approved, the case is added to this queue. Using a redacted view, users make the initial charging decision. Once the initial decision is made, the reviewer has access to the full case and can make the final charging decision. The case is removed from this queue when the final charging decision is made.

Configure queue users

You configure the users that should participate in queues on the Security screen.

  1. Navigate to Left navigation  System Administration  Security.

  2. Click the user you want to setup for a queue.

  3. Click the Profile / Workflow Options tab.

  4. In the Workflow Roles field, select the queue you want the user to participate in.

    Workflow Roles field configured for the Race Blind Charging Received queue
Once a user is setup for a queue, they need to add the Assignments widget to their Dashboard to access the queue.

Configure race-blind charging

  1. Navigate to Left navigation  System Administration  Race Blind Charging

    Configure Race-blind Charging settings

  2. Select Enable Race-blind Charging.

    The screen updates and shows the configuration options:

General settings

Field Description

Auto Exception Active

If selected, the system checks each charge on a case. If a charge has the RBC Exempt mark at the statute level, the system exempts the Case. See Statutes for more information.

Race-blind Charging Case Types

Select the case types where Race-blind Charging should apply.

Race-blind Charging does not apply to unselected Case types.

Protected Security Authorities

These authorities access a redacted version of the Case until the initial charging decision. Users in these protected security authorities may be responsible for making the initial charging decision. Refer to Configure queue users for more information.

For eProsecutor Online, set the protected authorities to:

  1. viewOnly

  2. powerUser

    The powerUser authority indicates users with authority to delete data. This includes all types of Power and Super users.

  3. finAdmin

These settings allow all General users to do the initial case intake and redaction, while leaving all other roles available for the charging process.

Test Mode

Select to turn on Race-blind Charging test mode which allows sending documents to the redaction tool, but prevents saving initial and final Race-blind Charging decisions.

Contact support for more information on automated redaction tools.

Document redaction settings

This section configures how the system redacts documents:

Field Description

Document Redaction Method

Choose between manual or automated redaction.

Manual redaction requires users to redact documents by uploading redacted documents or using the redaction tools available in the DocView.

Auto redaction sends documents to an automated redaction tool configured using the API settings.

Contact support for more information on automated redaction tools.

Document Party Types

Select which Party types to show in the redacted Case view. eProsecutor Online sends the types to third-party redaction services during redaction.

Document Redaction Page Size

Configure how many documents per page to show for manual or automated redaction.

Redaction service settings

This section configures a redaction service for automatic redaction, if selected. You can ignore this section when you use manual redaction.

Field Description

Authentication URL

Configures the server URL for retrieving an access token.

API Base URI

Configures the API URI of the document redaction service.

Agency ID

Configures the API agency ID.

Access Key

Configures the API access key.

Access Secret

Configures the API access secret.

Max File Size

Configures the maximum file size, in megabytes, when sending a document for automatic redaction. The system does not send files larger than this size for redaction.