Tennessee Woman Falsely Jailed Over AI Facial Recognition Sues Fargo for $10m

Angela Lipps, 50, was arrested at gunpoint by US marshals at her home in Tennessee in July 2025 while she was babysitting her neighbor’s four children. She 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, according to the complaint.

Lipps, a mother of three and grandmother of five who had 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. There she was charged with four counts of unauthorized use of personal identifying information and four counts of theft.

The charges were ultimately dropped. Lipps 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.

Eric Rice, another attorney for Lipps, told Tennessee television station WKRN that the $10m his client is seeking is “obviously … a significant number, but it reflects the specific harm that happened to Angela.” He added: “Can you imagine being taken away at gunpoint, held in detention, taken from your family?” A Fargo government spokesperson said the city does not comment on pending litigation.

The lawsuit names the city of Fargo and Lucas Heck, a city police detective identified in the complaint as having requested the arrest warrant for Lipps, 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 says, adding that she missed family birthdays, spent her own birthday incarcerated and missed holidays including Thanksgiving and Christmas. While in custody, she was denied basic care, such as her medications and her dentures, according to the complaint.

After her release, Lipps learned she had lost her residence, her car and her personal property, the lawsuit states. The experience, it says, has left her with “lasting hardships and trauma that might be managed but never erased.”

The complaint says 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 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 that the 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.”