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The Defender Association of Philadelphia is set to receive a quarter of a million dollars for technology upgrades to allow for case information to be accessed quickly and remotely.

In an interview with The Legal, Chief Defender Keir Bradford-Grey and state Sen. Vincent Hughes, D-Philadelphia, said that the grant from the Pennsylvania Department of Education will increase the effectiveness of representation afforded to indigent defendants.

"We've been swamped with getting stuff off of cellphones, surveillance videos," as evidence in criminal cases, Bradford-Grey said. "That has been a lot of our work and a lot of that money will go toward training for our IT staff, the equipment that we may need to download and store the data, as well as training for our lawyers."

Hughes was the legislative point person in helping the defender association secure the grant.

"The folks in the Defender's Office have indicated that they are in need of some dramatic investment to allow them to manage, in a very simple way, the tremendous amount of data that they have to process to provide adequate defense of their clients," Hughes said.

Hughes said the resources of prosecutors "far exceed" that of the defenders.

"The defense needs to be able to have similar resources to have access to all the data, in a rather rapid way," noting that some of the defender association's equipment is 10 to 15 years old.

Bradford-Grey said the upgrades are part of a new trend hitting defenders' offices across the country.

The technology will also go toward assisting the association in processing statistics.

"We have a police accountability unit, and recently we provided data to understand the car stops in Philly," Bradford-Grey said. "We analyzed how often black drivers are stopped—and we utilized that to start the conversation about stop-and-frisk."

The news of the technology grant comes less than a month after the association received $25,000 from R.K. Mellon Family Foundation to help educate community members facing prosecution about the intricacies of the criminal justice system.

That grant, from the Pittsburgh-based Mellon Foundation, is set to go toward Philadelphia's seven Participatory Defense Hubs, established in 2018 as a resource for defendants and their families.

The program uses community-based, trained volunteers and facilitators to give participants a better understanding of law enforcement and the court's expectations from them at each stage of the criminal justice process. That includes meetings with legal representation, court dates and other important aspects of their case.

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Phila. Public Defenders Secure Grant for Community Criminal Justice Assistance 'Hubs'