AI Named the Wrong Suspect and a Tennessee Woman Spent Half a Year in North Dakota Jail

[Stan]

The tragedy of the Fargo warrant wasn't just a technological error, it was an institutional refusal to verify the facts.

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[Asia Joe]

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What matters is that the government took her liberty on the word of a machine, and no one along the chain of custody that followed thought it necessary to verify that word before acting on it.

 

It is time to hold the judge who signed the arrest warrant accountable. 

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It is worth being precise about why this matters as a matter of law, because the popular outrage, however justified, is aimed at the wrong target. The outrage is aimed at the algorithm. It should be aimed at the human beings who treated the algorithm’s guess as a substitute for their own constitutional obligations.

Well said

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The individuals most responsible for the charging decision are likely protected by absolute immunity under Imbler v. Pachtman, a doctrine that shields prosecutorial conduct more broadly than many would find comfortable, and that remains the law regardless.

They may be protected from criminal prosecution, but not from the bright light of social media. They should be shamed out of town. 

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A system of justice is not measured by how it treats the cases that resolve themselves easily. It is measured by how it treats the cases where a machine’s uncorroborated guess travels, unchallenged, through a detective, a prosecutor, and two judges, and ends only when a woman personally suffers five months of incarceration for a crime that a bank statement could have disproven on day one. Whether Angela Lipps ultimately prevails in court will depend on facts not yet public. Whether she should prevail is not, on the present record, a difficult question. It rarely is, once the algorithm is taken out of the sentence and the human beings around it are asked what they actually did.

Very well-written article.