FARMINGTON— Davis County Attorney Troy Rawlings came before the County Commission at Tuesday’s meeting to ask for the commissioners’ approval of a new storage management system, AXON Enterprise, inc, that would help process evidence in a more timely manner than the previous system.

“The Davis County Attorney’s Office is on life support,” said Rawlings. “The flow of evidence in our profession is like blood flowing through the human body. If that blood doesn’t flow you’ve got a problem.”

Rawlings said his office was contracted with a vendor that was originally Utah-based and who was part of the case management system. “That vendor sold out to another company and they did good. Things were going good for a while. Our evidence was flowing.”

What that means is it’s a portal, he said. “It’s an electronic way of getting evidence from every police agency, federal, state and local that we work with. They uploaded it to our portal for us. We managed it, we put it in our cases and we could deal with it.”

Then a waiver is given to the defense council to retrieve it from the cloud, said Rawlings. “They can download it to have their videos, their police reports, everything in a timely manner. We’re under deadlines. We are under timelines.”

People are sitting in jail, he said. “Even if they’re not, they're experiencing trial issues. We had judges frustrated because the vendor we were contracting with was sold out to a California company.”

They didn’t care much about the Attorney’s Office or about Utah, said Rawlings. “They didn’t care about servicing this portion of it so we had to act quickly. It stopped. We were literally not able to upload and provide evidence to defense attorneys or manipulate and put it into our own system for a period of time.”

“There were hundreds of cases that were impacted,” said Managing Legal Defender Todd Utzinger. “Those in custody couldn’t get evidence that not only impacted the defendants but the victims. It’s an unfortunate situation that we’re in but we believe this software will be excellent.”

It has significant capacity, he said. “It provides unlimited storage, literally unlimited storage which when you’re talking about terabytes upon terabytes of information that is uploaded by law enforcement agencies which is part of the problem we ran into.”

It has many other features that are going to be vital for the criminal division, said Utzinger. “It has the ability to translate, transcribe and modify video clips, redact documents and search capabilities that are state-of-the-art and so forth.”

Cases can’t be backlogged, said Rawlings. “Defendants can’t be sitting in jail waiting for their trials. So we decided that we’re going to find another solution. So we pivoted quickly to a national leader in this area. They actually were willing to step in and take over what the previous company was failing to do for us.”

Rawlings said they were able to act quickly. “Now we’re in a position to present a contract to you (commission) today that solves this problem. We’re now at the point of being off life support again. We’re actually going to be better and faster, more nimble with this company.”

This is mandatory for the Attorney’s Office, he said. “We cannot get evidence from the police. We cannot give it to defense counsel and that’s literally the position we were in without doing it manually. When all of my employees are spending their time doing that, that means they’re not really processing and focusing on cases, on trial programs, or things they need to do.”

Rawlings said he wanted to give the public the background. “I know we’re in a tight budget situation. We’re spending public money but I wanted the public to know why we’re spending it. It’s obligatory on our part and everybody involved here acted quickly to solve a problem that could have led to a dismissal of a number of cases if we didn’t fix this right away.”

Commissioner Bob Stevenson and Commission Chair John Crofts approved the ratification of the National Association of State Procurement Officials (NASPO) ValuePoint Cooperative Agreement Between Davis County and Axon Enterprise, Inc.