GIST: "Attorneys defending the Chicago man accused of killing graduate student Anat Kimchi in 2021 argued in court Monday that facial recognition technology used to identify him isn’t reliable and may have tainted the case.
They called for the pretrial release of Tony Robinson, 45, who has been charged in the unprovoked stabbing.
Judge John Lyke ruled that Robinson — who is also accused of attacking two other women in the days before Kimchi’s killing — still poses a risk to the community and needs to stay locked up, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.
“These offenses are highly violent,” Lyke said. He added that, although Robinson is presumed innocent, earlier testimony showed he posed “a real and present threat.”
The case was one of several examined in a Chicago Sun-Times investigation into violent attacks downtown by people who exhibited symptoms of severe untreated mental illness.
Robinson, who lived in a tent, had a history of arrests and bizarre behavior. Robinson told detectives “he believes people are following him and tracking his location using their cellphones.”
His case is believed to be the first in Cook County, and possibly Illinois, in which facial recognition technology has been challenged in court.
Quandee Semrow of the public defender’s forensic science division asked the judge to bar all evidence derived from the use of facial recognition or force the prosecution to provide more information about how it was used.
Semrow said police took a still image of Robinson’s face from an officer’s body camera and ran it through “black box” facial recognition software to get his name from a database of photos.
She noted that an eyewitness didn’t pick Robinson out of a lineup that included the still photo.
Semrow said images can be manipulated with editing tools that can introduce errors, and those of nonwhite people and women have been shown to have higher error rates."
The entire post can be read at:
https://crimjj.wordpress.com/2025/08/26/facial-recognition-evidence-challenged-in-case-of-chicago-student-murder/PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
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FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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