“She struggled with the fear of not knowing when she would be released or whether she would end up wrong convicted and imprisoned for years,” the lawsuit alleges. “She missed family birthdays. She spent her own birthday incarcerated, separated from her family. She missed holidays with her loved ones, including Thanksgiving and Christmas. While in custody, she was denied basic care, such as her medications and her dentures.”
A Tennessee woman who says that she was falsely charged with bank theft has filed a lawsuit against a North Dakota-based police department, claiming that officers identified her as a suspect based on nothing but feedback from an artificial intelligence program.
According to The Guardian, the complaint was filed earlier this month on behalf of 50-year-old Angela Lips. In court documents, attorneys for Lipp say that she was babysitting her neighbor’s children in July 2025 when she was arrested, at gunpoint, by agents from the U.S. Marshals Service. She was then booked into a county jail, where she remained for nearly four months while awaiting extradition to North Dakota, where she was held for an additional two.
Lipps, writes The Guardian, says that she’s spent almost all of her life in north-central Tennessee. Before her arrest and extradition to North Dakota, she had never even been on an airplane. But, upon arrival to the Midwestern state, Lipp was charged with four counts of unauthorized use of personal identifying information and four counts of theft.
The charges against Lipps were dropped, though she now claims that, rather than receiving assistance returning to Tennessee, she was instead “released into the freezing cold … on Christmas Eve with no way to get home.”
Jay Greenwood, a lawyer representing Lipps in the lawsuit, provided the court with documents showing she had been in Tennessee at the same time the crimes she was charged with were being committed in Fargo, North Dakota.
Another attorney for Lipps, Eric Rice, told WKRN that his client is seeking $10 million in compensation—a significant amount, but one which “reflects the specific harm that happened to Angela.”
“Can you imagine being taken away at gunpoint, held in detention, taken away from your family?” Rice asked.
The lawsuit names defendants including the city of Fargo and Lucas Heck, the latter being a city police detective who allegedly requested the warrant for Lipps’s arrest.
Lipps has since said that she “experienced traumatic conditions in the jails.”
“She struggled with the fear of not knowing when she would be released or whether she would end up wrong convicted and imprisoned for years,” the lawsuit alleges. “She missed family birthdays. She spent her own birthday incarcerated, separated from her family. She missed holidays with her loved ones, including Thanksgiving and Christmas. While in custody, she was denied basic care, such as her medications and her dentures.”
Once she was released, Lipps learned that she had lost her residence, her car, and much of her personal property, leaving her with “lasting hardships and trauma that might be managed but never erased.”
The “Fargo police department (FPD) and its agents have refused to accept responsibility or apologize to Lipps despite multiple requests for them to do so,” the lawsuit says.
Lipps’s legal team claims that she was identified as a suspect based off another woman’s use of a fake ID card, images of which were obtained by investigators and fed into an artificial intelligence-powered facial-recognition program. Though Lipps did not resemble the suspect seen on surveillance cameras, Heck allegedly “suggested” that the program’s confirmation was sufficient evidence to conduct an arrest—despite allegedly taking no further steps to investigate the crime or ensure that the warrant was for the right suspect.
“They knew that AI facial recognition technology should not be used as the sole basis to extradite and charge a person,” the lawsuit alleges. “Yet they ignored those issues and gave no care to the harm it would do to innocent people like Lipps.”
“As AI facial recognition becomes more accessible and widespread, Lipps hopes that her case will cause officers to use appropriate care and consider the harm their actions can have on those who are wrongly accused,” it says.
Sources
Tennessee woman sues Fargo, city detective over AI-aided arrest
US woman falsely charged with bank theft sues for $10m over AI facial recognition
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