Ohio Ag Yost is put aside with the Cleveland Police in case of murder in which the officers used AI to justify the search

Cleveland, Ohio – The main official of Ohio’s law has been placed on the side of the Cleveland Police in the controversial use of artificial intelligence to justify a search warrant in a murder investigation.

The Ohio Attorney General’s Office, Dave Yost, presented a summary of a friend of the court this week asking an Appeals Court to allow evidence in a case of murder that was collected after the Cleveland police used Artificial Intelligence Software to justify a search warrant in the house of a murder suspect.

The presentation or a amicus curiae briefIt is a statement written by a group that is not involved in a particular case, but seeks to offer information in a relevant thematic area, since it would be affected by a decision or precedent of the Court.

The document occurs when the Cuyohoga County prosecutors present their case before the 8th Court of Appeals of the Ohio district after a common judge of common pleasure ruled that the search warrant was unconstitutional, eliminating the tests resulting from the case.

This search warrant appeared what the police say that it was the murderer, a Taurus G3 used to shoot Blake Story twice on the back on Valentine’s Day 2024. The authorities accused Qeyeon Tolbert of being the murderer.

Last March, Tolbert was accused of aggravated murder charges, theft, kidnapping, criminal assault, evidence manipulation and illegally has a firearm.

Without evidence collected from the search for Tolbert’s house, county prosecutors have said in judicial documents that the case could be lost.

Tolbert’s lawyers, Daniel “Danny” Tirfagnehu and Brian Fallon, are scheduled to present an answer on March 25. The American Union of Civil Liberties of New York and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers are also scheduled to present a friend of the court, the judicial records show.

Tirfagnehu and a Yost spokesman declined to comment.

The case

The murder was caught in a city surveillance chamber, but the camera was too far to see exactly who the murderer was, Cleveland.com and the plain Dealer reported in January.

Initially, the main evidence had that the police was the distant surveillance video, which showed the murderer stopping at the entrance path of Tolbert’s apartment before the murder. After the murder, the murderer ran to and from the area of ​​Tolbert’s apartment, apparently changing clothes and collecting caps, police said.

Police, however, did not see the murderer or leave the Tolbert apartment.

A week after the murder, the Cleveland police requested the northeast regional merger of Ohio, an intelligence group for the application of the inter -institutional law, which helps identify the murderer.

The Cleveland Police sent the photos of the Tolbert fusion center buying in a neighborhood convenience store, and the agency matched it to an image of Tolbert through the use of Clearview AI, a facial recognition software driven by artificial intelligence.

The AI ​​program coincided with the image of Tolbert’s purchases in the convenience store with the previous photos of Tolbert. Clearview AI did not coincide with Tolbert with the murder video.

Detective Michael Legg, a Cleveland homicide detective for 28 years, used the AI ​​party in his affidavit that supports a search warrant of the Tolbert apartment. Legg did not say that identification was made based on artificial intelligence, nor said Clearview AI explicitly prohibits its reports used in legal procedures.

Once the police had a name and identification for Tolbert, they noticed that he had the same “construction, hairstyle, clothing and walking characteristics” as the murderer, Legg said in his affidavit.

Defensor lawyers said the AI ​​report was the only evidence that linked the murder to Tolbert. They argued that legg’s affidavit was “misleading” because he did not mention that identification was based on inadmissible evidence and that Legg implied that the fusion center had positively identified Tolbert as the murderer in the surveillance video.

In January, Judge Richard McMonagle, who acted as a visiting jurist in the case, put himself on the side of the defense, comparing the use of artificial intelligence with an “anonymous informant”, which is not enough to establish a probable cause, as shown in the judicial records.

In response, prosecutors appealed to the 8th district.

What’s new

The criminal case is waiting while the Court of Appeals considers whether the results of the search warrant can be admitted to the trial.

As part of that appeal, Yost’s office presented its brief argument that the search warrant is valid and the resulting evidence must be admissible in court.

The attorney general’s office indicates that the search warrant was for the department of Tolbert, not him personally. The police had already focused on Tolbert’s apartment because the murderer ran towards him and away from him immediately before and after the murder.

“The officers had a probable cause to search the Tolbert unit in the Apartment building with or without their identity,” Yost’s office wrote.

As for Legg not to tell a judge that Tolbert’s identification was based on AI evidence that is not admissible in court, state prosecutors said it was not atrocious enough to throw evidence collected in the search warrant.

“The omission of the detective legg of the discharges of responsibility of the AI ​​of his affidavit was negligent in the worst case and, in any case, he did not make the search unreasonable: the non -dissemination was not almost deliberately false or misleading,” said Yost.