Step aside Max Headroom, Chris Pelkey is in the courtroom. Well, not really, but close enough for Judge Todd Lang in Arizona.
Chris Pelkey was killed in a road rage shooting in Chandler, Arizona, in 2021.
Three and a half years later, Pelkey appeared in an Arizona court to address his killer. Sort of.
Pelkey, 37, was shot to death by 50-year-old Gabriel Paul Horcasitas, who was in the car behind him. When an unarmed Pelkey approached Horcasitas, he pulled his weapon and killed Pelkey. Horcasitas was convicted of manslaughter, and time came for sentence. So too did Chris Pelkey.
Pelkey’s appearance from beyond the grave was made possible by artificial intelligence in what could be the first use of AI to deliver a victim impact statement. Stacey Wales, Pelkey’s sister, told local outlet ABC-15 that she had a recurring thought when gathering more than 40 impact statements from Chris’s family and friends.
“All I kept coming back to was, what would Chris say?” Wales said.
The propriety of victim impact statements is controversial in itself. Crimes are against society, not the individuals impacted, which gives rise to the legitimacy of imprisonment as opposed to damages. Moreover, should a sentence be reduced, or increased, because of a person’s view of punishment or culpability? Is the life of a person without any relatives to speak for him any less worthy than one with lots of family? Does the articular person prevail over the inarticulate?
But here, the impact statement wasn’t from a victim, but from the imaginary perspective that might, or might not, reflect what the deceased victim’s family believed would be the victim’s position.
“To Gabriel Horcasitas, the man who shot me, it is a shame we encountered each other that day in those circumstances,” says a video recording of Pelkey. “In another life, we probably could have been friends.
“I believe in forgiveness, and a God who forgives. I always have, and I still do,” Pelkey continues, wearing a grey baseball cap and sporting the same thick red and brown beard he wore in life.
Of course, Pelkey might very well have felt differently when it was his death, because who would know since he was never killed before? Or the AI reflected the family’s belief of what Pelkey would have believed, making it an AI recreation of the family’s view and not the victim’s at all. Who knows?
Assuming the best of intentions and the best of faith, one immutable fact remains: It’s not real. It is a fantasy. It might be a nice fantasy, a fantasy that reflected what would have been real had a dead person been able to express himself, but it is still pure fantasy. AI hallucinations of nonexistent caselaw in briefs and motions have resulted in well-earned sanctions for lawyers too lazy to do their job, but it’s just the beginning of what AI might be permitted to do in the courtroom.
As AI spreads across society and enters the courtroom, the US judicial conference advisory committee has announced that it will begin seeking public comment as part of determining how to regulate the use of AI-generated evidence at trial.
Does AI have a place in the courtroom, or is the danger that it creates the appearance of reality when it is so easily manipulated as to reflect whatever its creator wants it to reflect, bringing a very real appearing lie into the courtroom that serves only to undermine the integrity of evidence?
In this case, would it not have been sufficient for the deceased victim’s family to have expressed, during their victim impact statement, what they believed Pelkey would have said had he been alive? Whether or not that would be accurate would remain a mystery, but at least it would not have created the falsehood of the words coming from what appeared to be the victim’s mouth when it was nothing more than an AI generated fantasy. And yet, Judge Lang allowed it in, even if it didn’t do much to influence the sentence he imposed, which exceeded that sought by the prosecution.
Stacey Wales, Pelkey’s sister, said everyone who knew Pelkey “agreed this capture was a true representation of the spirit and soul of how Chris would have thought about his own sentencing as a murder victim.”
The state asked for a 9.5-year sentence, and the judge ended up giving Horcasitas 10.5 years for manslaughter, after being so moved by the powerful video, family says. The judge even referred to the video in his closing sentencing statements.
So much for mercy.
Update: Unsurprisingly, Victim’s rights advocate Paul Cassell sees no problem with Pelkey’s impact statement.
H/T Rick Horowitz