A man convicted of manslaughter in Arizona will receive a new sentencing hearing because an AI-generated video of his victim was ruled to carry undue emotional weight. An appellate court in Arizona decided the manslaughter charge stands, but the judge must reconsider the prison term length due to the impact of the digital recreation.
The case background
In 2021, Gabriel Horcasitas shot and killed Christopher Pelkey during a road rage incident. A jury found him guilty of manslaughter. During the sentencing hearing, Pelkey’s sister Stacey Wales played an AI-generated video of her brother as part of the victim impact statement.
The video featured an AI avatar of Pelkey that Wales scripted with her own words. The likeness forgave the killer and stated they could have been friends in another life. Wales told 404 Media she intended to sway the judge with the clip.
“Isn’t that what you want human connection to be?” Wales said. “Do you ever come out of a movie and say: ‘Well, that was too emotional. That was too powerful. Human connection is powerful, and trying to convey that to somebody that’s never known another person, this person on the earth, to convey their lifetime of 37 years down to a two-hour sentencing event is hard to do, and I think that victims and victims’ families should be afforded every opportunity.”
The judge’s reaction
The judge handed down the maximum sentence of ten and a half years.
“I loved that video,” the judge said.
After sentencing, Horcasitas appealed. He argued the AI Pelkey video was inadmissible because it carried undue emotional weight. Court documents reviewed by 404 Media stated the lifelike AI recreation of the victim conveyed authority and authenticity that had a psychological impact on the judge.
Precedent from a 2007 case
The appellate court agreed and cited State v. Rose, a 2007 murder case where a man was sentenced to death for the murder of a police officer. During the victim impact portion of the sentencing in that case, the judge saw photos of the police officer’s children at his graveside. The court said those photos almost crossed the line into prejudicing the judge.
“The AI video crossed that line. Unlike the photographs in Rose, which captured a particularly poignant moment for the young surviving victims, the AI video here […] does not reflect actual events,” court documents said.
“It clearly impacted the sentencing judge, who said he ‘loved the video’ and felt it ‘was genuine,’ pointing to the AI victim’s ‘obvious forgiveness’ of Horcacistas,” the court documents said. “On this record, the judge’s consideration of the AI video so prejudiced Horcasitas as to render the sentencing procedure fundamentally unfair.”
What happens next
Wales and the rest of Pelkey’s family have spent the last five years in and out of various court rooms related to his death. If the current ruling holds, then she will travel to Arizona from New York and give the same statement she did the first time through her brother’s AI-generated mouth, minus the AI-generated video.
The same judge who originally said “I loved that video” will do the sentencing.
“Likely, the same people will go back down and make their speeches, and I will be making my victims’ impact statement that I wrote for myself the first time around again, and I will be delivering Chris’s AI script sentiment again,” she said. “If I need to stand there and read it myself, which would be legally lawful, I am prepared to do that. Chris’s sentiment does not change. The delivery method will.”
Wales said she wrote the words that came out of the AI version of her brother, they were not AI-generated. She also noted that only the judge, her family, and the Horcasitas family were the only people who saw it during the trial.
“This was not offered as evidence. Juries never saw this,” she said. “This was only created after a verdict was solidified, a guilty verdict.”
She also noted that the AI video was only one of a larger piece of testimony given that day. “I think that [the judge] is unfairly represented with a soundbite,” she said.
According to Wales, the judge spoke for around half an hour and only mentioned the AI video once. Wales herself uploaded the soundbite from the judge saying he loved the AI-generated impact statement to YouTube, where it went viral.
A new medium
She also said she understood that AI is a new technology and when she played the AI-generated video of her brother that she was doing something no one else had done yet. She compared it to the way courts thought of photography in the late 19th century.
“It took about 15 years […] and about five landmark cases in the United States that went all the way up to the Supreme Court before photography was an accepted standard to be used in the courtroom for evidence, identification, and testimony, et cetera,” she said. “I believe that’s what we’re seeing now with AI. It is a brand new medium.”
Wales said she understood she was setting a precedent, for good and for bad, and that she was OK with that.
“There is always that first case, and so that mantle weighs on me that I need to be careful with how I defend this and how I explain the impetus, the goals, the motivations, and the veracity of what was created, because there are victims that depend on freedom of speech for the future, and I do believe that victims and their families should have every opportunity available to them to make their their points,” she said.
There is no firm date for the new sentencing.
“We do respect the court’s opinion, and if we need to operate in those guardrails, I am prepared to read the same script that the AI version of Chris read the first time around,” she said. “His sentiment has not changed. Our opinion of what we believed he would think about this whole thing has not changed. The words I penned as Chris’s imagined opinion still have not changed and will not change.”
