In May 2025, I wrote about a woman in Arizona who used AI to resurrect her brother (in a sense) to speak on his own behalf (in a weird, cryptic way) in a courtroom in front of the man who killed him. Back then, the judge on the case absolutely flipped for this grim display of AI use. Now, that judge’s love of the creepy AI video has led an appeals court to vacate a 10½-year sentence for Gabriel Paul Horcasitas, calling the decision to allow the video to be shown in the first place a “fundamental error.”
It all started when Stacey Wales made a digital ghost of her brother, Christopher Pelkey, who Horcasitas fatally shot in a 2021 road rage incident. At the 2025 sentencing, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Todd Lang watched this artificial avatar put words in Pelkey’s mouth, as it offered Horcasitas absolution for his crime: “In another life, we probably could have been friends. I believe in forgiveness.”
Judge Lang, apparently enamored by the ghastly use of the tech, gushed, saying, “I loved that AI.” He then handed Horcasitas the maximum penalty anyway, despite noting that the digital specter didn’t ask for it.
The AI Deepfake That Helped Send a Man to Prison Also Got His Sentence Thrown Out
The appellate judges were not nearly as thrilled by the AI courtroom resurrection, so they tossed out the manslaughter sentence, pointing out what should have been obvious from the start: replacing a dead guy with an algorithmic puppet built from his sister’s wishful imagining of how events would play out is nothing more than a bunch of very odd fanfiction come to life.
The judges ruled that letting a deepfake ventriloquist dummy derail due process was fundamentally unfair, because a computer-generated corpse doesn’t actually reflect reality. Now Horcasitas heads back to court to do the whole thing over again, hopefully minus the digital necromancy.
The post A Dead Man’s AI Doppelgänger Spoke in Court. It Went About as Well as You’d Expect. appeared first on VICE.
