A Tennessee grandmother who spent six months in jail after facial recognition tech falsely linked her to a North Dakota bank fraud investigation now wants compensation for what happened. Angela Lipps is suing the City of Fargo and a Fargo Police Department detective for $10 million over the incident, which led to the loss of her home, car, and dog.
In July 2025, a team of US Marshals arrested 50-year-old Lipps in Tennessee at gunpoint while she was babysitting four young children. She was booked into the county jail in Tennessee as a fugitive from justice wanted in North Dakota.
10 Million seems low to me. Cars and homes can be replaced: pets and neighbors and community cannot be replaced, they are priceless.
Detective Lucas Heck proceeded with charges despite knowing that Lipps lived in Tennessee, had never visited North Dakota, did not match the physical description of the suspect captured on surveillance footage, and had no unexplained funds linking her to the thefts.
Wow, ACAB. How wildly incompetent are they?
Yeah, but they closed a case!!
And the state? They jailed her with insufficient proof.
Yes.
The lawsuit should include whoever wrote that train wreck of a headline, too
Hope she gets every single dime and that cops loses every fucking thing he owns. Ruin her life knowing goddamn well she was not guilty.
The companies that run this facial recognition should be the ones to pay first and foremost. The villains never pay themselves, we are paying victims from the taxes of the victims.
The way these things work it’s up to the City Of Fargo to, after paying $10 million to this lady, go after the supplier they hired for the facial recognition service because it was not up to claimed standards and resulted in such losses for the City Of Fargo.
I mean while they should be punished for their involvement, the CV didn’t keep her in prison for six months
Even so, they oversold the effectiveness you can be sure.
Every person that did the shoddy police and prosecution work should have to lose their house and spend 6 months in jail to keep their jobs.
And their dog.
well, the “good news” is they can literally fuck their dog, be found guilty and then get a job with the FBI
In an ideal world, she’d win every penny and the money would come out of the assets of each and every person involved in her arrest, including their immediate superiors so that lessons would be learned.
She lost her assets through no fault of her own. Seems only fair that they should lose theirs, if not worse, because they actually did something wrong.
That’s a bit vindictive. They probably didn’t pick the software or didn’t even know how it worked.
The idiots that did, and that trusted the facial recognition without verification, the company that made it (if it made false claims), those look more like the ones responsible.
They didn’t do due diligence. It was easily prevented by double checking everything
" ‘I was only following orders’ […] The refuge of scoundrels since the dawn of time. " - Patrick Ness
No, I’ve no idea who Patrick Ness is either, but it’s a quote from one of his works, and it happens to be true.
Now, Lipps has filed a lawsuit against the city and one of its detectives over her arrest. It alleges that Detective Lucas Heck proceeded with charges despite knowing that Lipps lived in Tennessee, had never visited North Dakota, did not match the physical description of the suspect captured on surveillance footage, and had no unexplained funds linking her to the thefts.
So the ones she’s suing. She likely can’t go after the software company because it’s very likely they just have like a confidence score and a legal thing that says “when you use this we’re just providing an estimate and possible match and you need to do your diligence.” But the fact the state/city/department has no policy that more corroborating evidence is required for an arrest / jail and that detective just blanket trusted the software without any other evidence means they should be the primary targets of the lawsuit. Additionally this is ripe for political candidates to take on, so I’m surprised she hasn’t gotten some politician using her as an example for more stringent policies in the use of facial recognition by law enforcement.
How was this not like immediatly cleared up, dont people have bond hearings within the week, whos rubber stamping this shit
Everybody should just periodically read random court cases, this stuff has always been extremely common and the sop when the mistakes are uncovered is to double down, just attempt to fully bury the innocent person in the system. This is a daily occurrence in every single state in the US.
Real talk, I just saw a quick video about how the mythbusters proved two dudes didn’t start a fire they were tortured into signing a confession for. They got a hearing and it was shown that the sheriff had a history of putting innocent people away. And after they were PROVEN FUCKING INNOCENT, they still spent another 17 years in jail!!!
Sounds like some Bakersfield shit.
There was a black dude in detroit that got falsely accused, and despite having an alibi and it clearly not being him they tried to make it stick anyway. That was a few years back.
Because making the billion dollar contractor look bad is not how you advance from prosecuting attorney to politician or whatever.
We have all the wrong people in charge, especially in the legal profession.
I mean the judge(s)
How did she lose her dog?
You are gone for six months, what are they going to do? Leave the dog to starve to death? The local pound or some other animal rescue organization picked them up and (hopefully) re-homed them (or otherwise put them down)
