Fight over disclosure of FRT used by NJ cops heads to state Supreme Court

A group of civil rights organizations are calling on the New Jersey Supreme Court to uphold rulings that grant a defendant in a murder trial details on the facial recognition system used to incriminate him.

The defendant Tybear Miles was arrested and charged last year with the first-degree murder of Ahmad McPherson, shot in the U.S. state of New Jersey in June 2021. During the trial, the suspect made a legal request to the court to order the release of specific information on the process and the technology used to identify him.

In an amicus brief in State vs. Miles, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) back Miles’ request, arguing that sharing these details is necessary to ensure courts are making decisions based on good evidence.

EPIC and other organizations involved in the amicus brief are hoping that the Supreme Court will uphold prior rulings in their favor based on the precedent set by the State v. Arteaga case.

“Facial recognition searches involve multiple components and steps that each introduce a significant possibility of misidentification,” the amicus brief notes. “Allowing the public to examine the details of the technology and process employed by the State will ensure fairness in the criminal system and reliability in the outcome of the proceedings.”

The case is part of a broader debate on the U.S. current regulatory vacuum related to police use of facial recognition. Last year, an investigation from the Washington Post revealed that police departments across the U.S. have been obscuring their use of the technology, denying defendants their right to contest the software’s results.

In the case of Tybear Miles, police received a tip from an informant who identified him as “Fat Daddy” and provided his Instagram account. Officers downloaded images from the social media account and fed them into a facial recognition system which then matched them with Miles’ mugshot. The charge was brought after the informant confirmed that the person in the mug shot was “Fat Daddy.”

The appellate court has already confirmed Miles’s right to compel discovery related to the State’s use of facial recognition. The state prosecution, however, is now appealing to the New Jersey Supreme Court.

In 2023, the New Jersey appeals court ruled that first-degree robbery defendant Francisco Arteaga has a right to know certain information about the AI algorithm used to match his face against a database of faces. This includes the error rate of the face-matching system, its performance against metrics such as the NIST Face Recognition Vendor Tests, how it operates and its underlying algorithm.

The defendant was also granted access to information about the database, including how it is managed, how images are gathered and the number of images held. Amicus briefs supporting Arteaga’s request were written by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Innocence Project and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Article Topics

algorithms  |  biometric matching  |  biometrics  |  facial recognition  |  New Jersey  |  police  |  United States