It sounds like the kind of story people would reject as too far-fetched if it showed up in a bad crime drama. A grandmother in Tennessee, who according to her lawyers had never been to North Dakota and had never even been on an airplane, was arrested at home, jailed, extradited to Fargo, and left to sit behind bars for months because police followed an AI lead that pointed to the wrong person.
That is the nightmare scenario attorney John Bryan laid out on The Civil Rights Lawyer, where he interviewed Angela Lipps’ North Dakota criminal defense lawyer, Jay Greenwood, and one of her civil rights attorneys, Eric Rice. Bryan’s basic point was hard to miss: this was not a case where police made one quick mistake and corrected it. In his telling, officers relied on an AI facial recognition match, did almost no real investigation to test it, and then kept the machinery of the criminal system moving while an innocent woman paid the price.
Greenwood and Rice, speaking from different sides of the case, described something even worse than a bad arrest. They described a system that seemed unable, or unwilling, to stop once the computer had supplied a name…