A North Carolina man spent three months in prison due to an AI error.

A North Carolina man has been released after spending several months in custody. Authorities finally acknowledged he did not commit the crime he was accused of. The acquitted man believes his arrest and detention were caused by a false positive using artificial intelligence, poor police work, and racial profiling, writes Yahoo!.

AI wrongly linked a North Carolina resident to a Florida car theft.

According to local news outlet Action News Jax, Jalil Richardson of Charlotte, North Carolina, was arrested and spent nearly three months in jail after being falsely accused of selling a stolen car to a Jacksonville, Florida, resident. One of the reasons for the arrest was that Jacksonville police used facial recognition (an artificial intelligence-based program) to identify Richardson as the man seen on surveillance cameras selling the car.

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Richardson's wife, Jasmine Jackson, said police told the couple the system had returned an "85% match." Based on this result, as well as the testimony of the man who reported the car fraud, Richardson was taken into custody on a variety of charges, including theft, trafficking in stolen property, and possession of a forged title.

Richardson himself insisted that he was at work in North Carolina, hundreds of miles from Florida, at the time of the crime. Timesheets confirm this. Authorities ultimately released him and dropped all charges.

The case has once again drawn attention to Jacksonville police's use of facial recognition.

In another case, a man was arrested after the program identified him as a "93% match" for the man who attempted to kidnap a 12-year-old child on Jacksonville Beach. This was later revealed to be an error, too.

Criminal defense attorney Michelle Suskauer, who was not involved in the cases, told Action News Jax that when using such technology on low-quality images, "errors are possible on multiple levels."

Jacksonville police, for their part, issued a statement defending their work.

"Facial recognition technology is one of the tools available to investigators," the statement reads. "In this case, it was one of the tools, but far from the only one, that helped establish reasonable grounds to believe Richardson was involved in these crimes."

Racial profiling and lack of proper investigation

Richardson believes his arrest is linked not only to the use of AI, but also to police negligence and racial profiling.

"I think it's racial profiling," he snarled, referring to the man who wrongly identified him as the perpetrator. "The guy said it was the guy with dreadlocks and a big nose, and then they picked me out of a group of people who don't look like me at all."

He accused police of failing to conduct basic background checks and ignoring his claims that he had never been to Florida.

"They didn't even do a proper investigation—they didn't even try to contact me and check if I was even in Florida," Richardson said. "They just automatically issued an arrest warrant."

Richardson emphasized that this incident ruined his life. After his arrest, he spent a month in jail in North Carolina, then was transferred to Florida, where he spent another 50 days in custody.

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During this time, he lost his job, housing, and custody of his two children. Even after the charges were dropped, his prison photo remains publicly available online, preventing him from finding new employment.

"I don't know how to recover from this," he admitted. "Too much trouble has fallen on me."

Now Richardson and his wife are trying to rebuild their lives after everything he lost because of a crime he didn't commit. They're not the only ones with questions: many are trying to understand how such a mistake could have happened, and what role artificial intelligence technology played in putting an innocent man in prison.

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