I was left stunned by *Tekken*! An AI misjudgment caused a grandmother to be wrongfully imprisoned for 163 days

The call was botched. After reading this case, my first reaction was that it was absurd—the kind of absurd where the hitbox is so off it’s practically outside the arena.

A grandmother in Tennessee, Angela Lipps, had never been to North Dakota and didn’t know anyone there, yet police labeled her the main suspect in a local bank fraud case. On July 14, 2025, she was at home taking care of 4 children when armed officers came and took her away. The police’s core evidence was an AI facial recognition system, which claimed that her facial features, body shape, and hairstyle matched the suspect seen in surveillance footage.

It’s like in a match, looking at just a single frame screenshot and declaring your entire combo confirmed. No one checked the startup, no one verified the follow-up—they just announced the result. Far too crude. Even more outrageous, Angela was first held in Tennessee without bail for 4 months, then extradited to North Dakota, spending a total of 163 days behind bars—close to 6 months.

Now let’s talk about the chain of evidence. What truly makes this case infuriating is not that a machine can make mistakes, but that people had every chance to correct it and still dragged their feet. Her lawyer submitted a full set of alibi evidence, including bank records, gas station purchase records, and food delivery orders, proving that she was in Tennessee at the time of the crime. The original report also explicitly noted that she had never even been on a plane, let alone traveled to North Dakota.

And yet, despite all that, police still delayed for nearly a month and didn’t release her until Christmas Eve. In the end, the charges were dropped, but she never received a formal apology. Even her trip home was not paid for by the police—it was covered through crowdfunding from kindhearted strangers. To put it bluntly, the mistake had already been confirmed, but they were so slow to retract it that it was like a game stuttering into negative frames.

And the cost of those 163 days was about much more than just being in jail. Because she had no income and no contact with the outside world for so long, the house and car she rented were repossessed, and her personal belongings, along with her pets, were disposed of. For an ordinary family, this isn’t like losing a tiny sliver of health—it’s like having your entire resource pool wiped out, and even starting a new run might not be enough to recover.

Afterward, Fargo police admitted there had been “some mistakes” in the case. They also said the facial recognition system used was borrowed, and that the problem was that its results were adopted directly without further verification. I don’t buy that explanation. Whether the tool was borrowed is beside the point. The real issue is that they treated the AI result as the final call, did no meaningful human review, and failed to properly assess the alibi evidence in time. That’s where they lost the points.

Finally, this is not an isolated case. The original report mentioned that in the United States, similar wrongful cases caused by AI misidentification are far from rare, and most victims struggle to receive compensation. For comparison, Robert Williams, who was detained for 30 hours, received $300,000; Randall Reid, who was held for one week, received $200,000. Angela was detained for 163 days, so if she ultimately wins her case, the compensation could be higher—but her lawyer is still considering a lawsuit, and the process is bound to be difficult.

From the broader trend, AI recognition will continue to be adopted by more agencies. That’s the direction things are heading, and there’s no going back. But this kind of technology should be treated only as an aiming aid, never as a one-hit kill. As long as machine recommendations are treated as final judgments, similar miscarriages of justice will keep surfacing. People in gaming communities often say that whether lag is tolerable becomes obvious after a single match; but when the justice system “misinputs” even once, the cost is half a year of someone else’s life.

In the end, Angela said only one thing: she was just glad the nightmare was finally over. It sounds understated, but by that point, the damage had already hit for full.