Facts
The defendant was charged with three counts of murder arising from a 2021 shooting. A bystander recorded about ten seconds of the incident on a smartphone, and the original low-resolution footage, which shows motion blur, was already in evidence. The defense sought to introduce an enhanced version prepared by an expert using Topaz Labs AI software and Adobe Premiere Pro, which increased the resolution and added sharpness and definition. The Superior Court of Washington for King County held a Frye hearing on whether the enhanced video was admissible.
Question
Under Washington law, evidence based on a novel scientific technique is admissible only if the technique is generally accepted in the relevant scientific community, the Frye standard. The court had to decide whether AI video enhancement met that test and which community was relevant. It also had to decide whether the enhanced video was admissible under Evidence Rule 702 on expert testimony and Evidence Rule 403, which allows exclusion where the danger of unfair prejudice or confusion substantially outweighs probative value.
Decision
The court excluded the AI-enhanced video and the defense expert’s testimony. It identified the relevant community as forensic video analysts and found that the enhancement tools had not been peer-reviewed or generally accepted in that field. The defense expert did not know what data the AI model had been trained on and agreed that the algorithms were opaque and proprietary. According to the testimony of the prosecution’s expert, the enhanced video added information that was not in the original and altered shapes and colors; the court found that it did not show with integrity what actually happened. The court also found the video inadmissible under ER 702 and ER 403, noting that the original footage remained available.
Why it matters
This is one of the first known U.S. rulings on AI-enhanced evidence in a criminal trial. The court applied existing reliability standards and treated generative enhancement as a new technique that must be validated by the forensic community before use. The reasoning is relevant wherever parties try to introduce AI-processed images, audio or video, and it shows how much weight courts may give to transparency about how a model works and what it was trained on.
Related stages
The defendant was convicted by a jury in May 2024 and on June 21, 2024 was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. The status of any appeal could not be confirmed.