Appeals Court Tosses Sentencing In Shooting Case Due To AI Video 

 We couldn’t get deeper into the week without a story that makes you question where we’re at as a society and how we got here. A man convicted of manslaughter must be resentenced after the victim’s family submitted an AI video of the victim forgiving his killer in court. 

The New York Times reports that the Arizona Court of Appeals ruled Gabriel Paul Horcasitas must be resentenced in the 2021 shooting death of Christopher Pelkey. The three-judge panel upheld Horcasitas’s conviction, but said the sentencing must be tossed because the original judge committed a “fundamental error” by allowing Pelkey’s family to submit the video as if it were actually Pelkey speaking to the court. 

“I believe in forgiveness and in God who forgives,” the video said. The video also has Pelkey addressing the court, saying, “This here is a true representation of who I was.” The appeals panel found that the video “erases the interpretive distance between the family’s belief about what the victim would have said and the victim’s own voice and opinions.”

The case stemmed from an incident on Nov. 13, 2021, when Horcasitas pulled up behind Pelkey and honked at him while he was stopped at a red light in Chandler. Pelkey got out of his car and approached Horcasitas’s vehicle with his hands in the air. This is when Horcasitas made the big brain move of shooting and killing an unarmed man. 

Judge Todd F. Lang of Maricopa County Superior Court apparently was a fan of the video, saying in court, “I loved that AI.” Lang went on to call the video “genuine,” noting that the victim was allowed to “speak from his heart.”

Despite being a big fan of the AI recreation, Lang still gave Horcasitas the maximum sentence, which was a year longer than the prosecution had asked for.

Just when I think my home state is done embarrassing me, it finds new and inventive ways to do so. I can’t even be like, “Well, that court was in Sun City,” cause I used to work down the street from the Superior Court. 

An AI flyer is enough to make me not want to visit a restaurant, so it’s crazy that an AI video was allowed to sway a judge’s sentencing decision. What purpose did the video serve? Who gains from this? The fact is that Pelkey is dead, and no matter how well AI can recreate his likeness, he can’t speak for himself or what he would’ve wanted. 

This is yet another instance where the law hasn’t caught up with how AI can and can’t be used. Earlier this year, a court ruled that AI-generated images depicting child sex abuse are protected under the First Amendment, as they don’t show real people. Common sense would tell you we should have safeguards and laws to prevent AI from being used to make those types of images, but we don’t. Neither Congress nor the Supreme Court has done anything to address this issue, and it’s clear they really need to get the ball rolling. 

AI is advancing at an alarming rate, and if we don’t have laws set in place regulating how it can be used, we’re just going to keep seeing strange stories like this one. 

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