Righting wrongs with CaseGuide
By Craig Ackley
In 2009, I was just easing into retirement from the FBI when I got a call from a former colleague. He was a Judge Advocate General (JAG) attorney with the Office of the Staff Judge Advocate (SJA), Fort Liberty, NC, and he asked me to come to North Carolina to assist on a homicide trial.
For 40 years, I’ve investigated, analyzed, and assisted in the prosecution of hundreds of criminal cases.
Each case is a different challenge, but this North Carolina case was particularly unique. A Sergeant with the U. S. Army had been convicted of murder of a woman and two of her children, and sentenced to death, in 1986. He successfully appealed the conviction in state court and a jury acquitted him in a second trial in 1989. In 2008, new forensic evidence linked the original suspect to the case, and to avoid double jeopardy, the military was preparing to try the individual in a federal court and wanted my assistance in putting the case together for trial. I traveled down to North Carolina and got to work organizing and analyzing the case information.
In every case, time is precious. Many hours are spent organizing, cataloging, and digitizing case file information – tedious but necessary work. I know how necessary this work is because I’ve done it firsthand. I started my career as a Special Agent with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, where I spent eight years investigating violent crimes. In 1988, I joined the FBI, spending 21 years as a Special Agent investigating violent crimes. I finished my FBI career in the Behavioral Analysis Unit at Quantico, where I assisted investigative and prosecutive agencies around the world with violent crime cases.
During that time, I developed a system and process for organizing and analyzing case files. I used that process while assisting prosecutors at Fort Liberty in 2009 with the retrial of that Sergeant on capital murder charges. From the initial investigation, through two trials, and the reinvestigation leading up to the last trial, there was a tremendous volume of information to organize and analyze. That process helped the prosecution achieve a second capital murder conviction of the Sergeant 25 years after the murders.
Since then, I have continued assisting the military and other agencies with complex violent crime trials, particularly in the areas of murder and sexual assault. In 2016, I worked with a software developer to create a standalone version of a software program, CaseGuide, which was based on the process I had developed over my career.
With CaseGuide, I was able to cut the time necessary to organize case files by 65%, automating much of the typical case file organization. This allowed me to devote more time for mining data and organizing my thoughts and notes for prosecutors.
This allows me to devote more time to mining data and organizing my thoughts and notes for prosecutors. Case files can run anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 pages. Far too often, the details get lost. But with CaseGuide, you can annotate documents, categorize information, and pull reports on every relevant person and piece of evidence to the trial.
In partnership with Bart Holzer, Compendia, Inc. co-founder, we have developed CaseGuide further into what it is today: a cloud-based, multi-case, multi-user product. Case files can easily contain 50,000 to 100,000 pages. Far too often, the details get lost when trying to review and analyze cases in traditional ways. With CaseGuide, you are guided through a process designed to increase efficiency and effectiveness in extracting and categorizing information, leading to more detailed reports, and other products necessary for the successful resolution of investigations and trials.