A Tennessee woman who was falsely charged with bank theft in North Dakota and jailed for six months has sued for $۱۰m in damages, alleging in a federal lawsuit that Fargo police improperly relied on an artificial intelligence (AI) facial recognition system to wrongly accuse her.
Angela Lipps, ۵۰, was arrested at gunpoint by US marshals at her home in Tennessee while babysitting her neighbor’s four children in July ۲۰۲۵. The mother of three and grandmother of five was booked into a county jail and remained there for almost four months without bail while awaiting extradition to North Dakota, where she was held for about two more months.
Lipps, who has lived most of her life in north-central Tennessee, had never been on a plane until authorities flew her to North Dakota at the end of October, where she was charged with four counts of unauthorized use of personal identifying information and four counts of theft.
The charges were ultimately dropped, and she was “released into the freezing cold … on Christmas Eve with no way to get home” after her lawyer, Jay Greenwood, provided bank records proving that she was in Tennessee at the time the fraud occurred in Fargo, the complaint says.
Another attorney for Lipps, Eric Rice, told Tennessee television station WKRN that the $۱۰m his client is seeking is “obviously … a significant number, but it reflects the specific harm that happened to Angela”.
“Can you imagine being taken away at gunpoint, held in detention, taken from your family?” Rice said.
A Fargo government spokesperson said the city does not comment on pending litigation.
Lipps’s lawsuit names the city of Fargo and Lucas Heck, a city police detective identified in the complaint as having requested the arrest warrant for her, as the defendants.
The plaintiff alleges 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 wrongly convicted and imprisoned for years,” the lawsuit continues. “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.”
Lipps learned she had lost her residence, her car and her personal property once she was released from custody, her lawsuit states. The experience, it says, has left Lipps 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 complaint says. The lawsuit says that it seeks to “repair what has been broken” over her false arrest and “seeks accountability” from the FPD.
Lipps’s complaint recounts how a west Fargo police investigator used AI facial recognition software to identify bank fraud suspects. The software returned Lipps’s social media photo as a potential lead, which was provided to Heck.
It alleges that the source of the facial recognition was a fake ID used by a female suspect who was captured in surveillance video footage. Lipps did not look like the female suspect and had also never been to North Dakota, according to the complaint.
The complaint alleges that Heck falsely suggested that facial recognition systems had identified Lipps and did not conduct further investigation or find sufficient probable cause – but requested an arrest warrant anyway.
Lipps maintains she was unlawfully arrested and imprisoned – as well as maliciously prosecuted – and that the FPD lacked policy, training and supervision of officers on the use of facial recognition technology.
“They knew that AI facial recognition technology should not be used as the sole basis to extradite and charge a person,” Lipps’s complaint 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 technology 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.”
Lipps’s lawsuit further alleges: “FPD was aware that the lack of supervision of an officer using facial recognition in an investigation could result in the wrongful detention and prosecution of a subject. Despite knowledge of this risk, FPD refused to supervise its officers’ use of facial recognition technology in a criminal investigation.”
