Imagine there’s a bank heist committed in Fargo, North Dakota. Cops pull a grainy photo of the suspect off a surveillance camera. They run that photo through AI facial recognition software, and it matches with an innocent grandmother down in Tennessee (who has never even been to North Dakota). Imagine they just run with that AI match and issue an arrest warrant, without performing an actual investigation into whether the AI is correct… Angela Lipps was arrested at her home in Tennessee, jailed and extradited to Fargo, North Dakota. She sat in jail for months, with nobody even bothering to check and see if she was the actual suspect they’re looking for (she wasn’t).
This man goes into a Walmart to buy his elderly mother some over-the-counter arthritis medication. Meanwhile, this woman is riding around on a mobility scooter, even though she’s not disabled. Her kids are literally hanging off it as she puts around the store. The man can’t find what he’s looking for, so when he sees this woman, he asks her if she knows where he can find it. Then, all hell breaks loose. The man, “Mick” Patel, ends up spending 47 days in jail over what were obviously-false accusations (and as it turns out, this may not have been her first time). A lawsuit was just filed. I got the chance to speak to his civil rights attorneys.
Cops respond to a silent alarm coming from within their own county courthouse, where they find intruders locked inside the dark, closed building. After taking them into custody, the ‘burglars’ tell the cops they are actually professional hackers, hired by the State Judicial Branch to test the courthouse’s security measures.
Then the local sheriff arrives, apparently embarrassed by the fact that the hired hackers were able to just walk right in an unlocked door in the middle of the night, and angry that he wasn’t informed of the security testing ordered by the state. So instead of releasing them, he orders handcuffs put on them and has them taken to the county jail and charged with burglary.
Then it gets even worse. The bureaucrats at the state judicial branch then get worried about their own jobs, and they attempt to throw the hackers they hired under the bus, initially claiming they did not authorize the “burglary,” even though they did. Eventually the State Supreme Court admits they hired the hackers and apologized for the confusion.
But the county still wanted to prosecute the two innocent hackers, who were caught in the middle of this government power struggle. Even up through the day before trial, the county prosecutor was refusing to drop the charges. He finally had to though, because they were innocent. So then the two hackers filed a civil lawsuit, which took years to litigate. Now, that just settled, with the two hackers receiving $600,000 from the county for their false arrest and malicious prosecution.
This is an absolutely insane story out of Iowa.
The official statement of facts from Justin and Gary’s lawsuit that was presented to the Court, much of which is quoted in the video:
