Grandmother jailed for six months after facial recognition mistake launches $10 million lawsuit against Fargo and detective

Why it matters: A Tennessee grandmother who spent six months in jail after facial recognition tech falsely linked her to a North Dakota bank fraud investigation now wants compensation for what happened. Angela Lipps is suing the City of Fargo and a Fargo Police Department detective for $10 million over the incident, which led to the loss of her home, car, and dog.

In July 2025, a team of US Marshals arrested 50-year-old Lipps in Tennessee at gunpoint while she was babysitting four young children. She was booked into the county jail in Tennessee as a fugitive from justice wanted in North Dakota.

The arrest stemmed from an investigation into bank fraud cases in April and May 2025. Detectives reportedly reviewed video of a woman using a fake US army ID to withdraw tens of thousands of dollars.

By using facial recognition software, the investigators identified Lipps as a possible match. She was charged with eight felonies, the most serious of which carried a 10-year prison sentence.

But Lipps had never been to North Dakota in her life, and bank records later confirmed she was more than 1,200 miles away at the time of the alleged crime.

She was held in a Tennessee county jail for 108 days before being transported to North Dakota. Jail staff allegedly denied her access to her dentures and medication for extended periods.

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She was released from custody on Christmas Eve after Lipps' attorney produced bank records showing she was in Tennessee at the time of the thefts. She left the jail with just four cents and no winter coat, leaving her stranded in Fargo in temperatures near 10 degrees. Lipps relied on a local nonprofit and a neighbor to get home to Tennessee.

As she could not pay her bills from jail, Lipps had lost her home, her car, and even her dog.

Now, Lipps has filed a lawsuit against the city and one of its detectives over her arrest. It alleges that Detective Lucas Heck proceeded with charges despite knowing that Lipps lived in Tennessee, had never visited North Dakota, did not match the physical description of the suspect captured on surveillance footage, and had no unexplained funds linking her to the thefts.

As reported by Valley News Live, the complaint also alleges that Heck failed to disclose that the facial recognition result came from a photo on the suspect's fake ID rather than surveillance footage. It also says he omitted that such results serve only as investigative leads requiring independent corroboration, rather than positive identification. According to the lawsuit, West Fargo police considered the results insufficient on their own to support charges.

The lawsuit also alleges that, at the time, the Fargo Police Department had no policies, training, or oversight in place to guide officers' use of facial recognition technology.

Lipps is seeking $10 million in damages, along with punitive damages against Heck and attorneys' fees, and has requested a jury trial.

Lipps' case isn't the only one in which facial recognition has misidentified someone. In 2020, Robert Williams was arrested after his driver's license photo was flagged as a likely match to a man seen stealing designer watches from a store in 2018. During questioning, Williams was told he was being arrested based solely on the results of a facial recognition lineup. Williams was innocent, the city of Detroit later agreed to pay him $300,000, and Detroit stopped making arrests based only on facial recognition software results.

While not misidentifying a person, there was also the case of a high school student who was swarmed by police after an AI camera thought the Doritos bag he was holding was a gun.