Grandmother sues after alleged AI facial recognition error led to months in jail, experts sound alarm
A Tennessee grandmother has filed a lawsuit against a North Dakota city and police department, accusing officials of wrongfully detaining her for nearly six months after allegedly misusing artificial intelligence facial recognition technology to investigate a bank theft case.
Angela Lipps, now 50, of Elizabethton, Tennessee, said she was caring for her neighbor's four young children when police showed up at the home and arrested her at gunpoint in July 2025.
The complaint, filed Sept. 15, 2026, alleges that authorities relied exclusively on a flawed AI facial recognition match to extradite Lipps from Tennessee to North Dakota, despite her having no connection to the crime or the state.
Experts on police technology told Fox News Digital that the case is among more than a dozen known instances involving alleged police mishandling of facial recognition technology.
"I sat in a county jail in Tennessee for 108 days," Lipps said in a GoFundMe post. "They said I was fugitive from justice. I had no bail. No one interviewed me. I just sat and waited."
FRAUD EXPERT WARNS AI IS HELPING CRIMINALS OUTPACE THE GOVERNMENT: 'DON'T HAVE THE RIGHT TOOLS'
The bank theft case stemmed from April and May 2025, when an unknown woman allegedly used fake IDs and stolen identities to perpetrate bank fraud in Fargo and West Fargo, North Dakota, according to the lawsuit.
Officials then used a photo from a fraudulent ID card presented by the suspect, rather than surveillance footage, to conduct facial recognition searches using Clearview AI, prosecutors alleged.
While Clearview AI explicitly requires facial recognition matches to be treated as potential leads, Fargo police allegedly characterized the AI match as a positive identification without disclosing that it had not been independently corroborated, according to the complaint.
Meanwhile, the West Fargo Police Department reportedly declined to seek charges because the AI match was uncorroborated.
A West Fargo police captain reportedly characterized AI facial recognition as "close to a last-ditch effort" in police investigations, the lawsuit said.
According to the complaint, Detective Lucas Heck did not review Lipps’ financial or travel records that showed she was in Tennessee during the bank thefts and failed to conduct photo lineups with bank tellers. Surveillance video reportedly showed physical differences between Lipps and the suspect, including a different build and a neck tattoo on Lipps that was absent from the suspect.
"Heck ignored, concealed, and misrepresented exculpatory evidence that Lipps did not commit the bank thefts," the complaint alleged.
On July 14, 2025, U.S. Marshals surrounded a neighbor’s house in Tennessee and arrested Lipps at gunpoint on a nationwide warrant, prosecutors said.
Lipps was extradited to North Dakota and reportedly held on a $100,000 bond while facing eight felony counts, the most severe of which carried maximum sentences of up to 10 years in prison.
Prosecutors dismissed all charges on Dec. 24, 2025, after Lipps produced bank records showing that she was in Tennessee when the bank thefts occurred, prosecutors said.
"When she was released, she found that her residence, car, and personal property were lost while she was absent," the complaint said.
FLOCK SAFETY CEO CALLS FOR NATIONAL 'COMPROMISE' AMID CAMERA SABOTAGE AND PUBLIC REVOLT
Following public scrutiny, the Fargo Police Department and city of Fargo acknowledged at a March 2026 press conference that the department had made investigative errors.
"When chief found some errors that were made in this area of where we got our facial recognition and how that worked, we immediately addressed it," Mayor Tim Mahoney said.
Clare Garvie, the deputy director of Technology Law & Policy with the Policing Project, told Fox News Digital that incidents involving the alleged mishandling of AI have increased as law enforcement agencies adjust to "integrate AI and additional tools into police investigations."
"We are aware of 16 misidentifications stemming from a face recognition match where someone was wrongfully arrested and spent time in jail because of that misidentification, and in many of these cases, it was because additional investigative steps weren't taken to prove, or in these cases to disprove, the face recognition match," Garvie said in an interview.
"We're asking officers to do a different job now, such that we need to update how we think about these workflows," she added.
In an interview with Fox News Digital, Nate Freed-Wessler, a deputy director at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the rise of artificial intelligence in law enforcement has fueled wrongful arrests across the country.
"We've been seeing these kinds of wrongful arrests happening for at least five or six years now out of this kind of AI technology. And the rate of them seems to be increasing," he said.
"We've seen cases where police intentionally avoid making any notes about their use of facial recognition technology or other AI."