AI Put on Trial in ‘Life or Death’ Police Tech Clashes (1)

The latest criminal justice battle is pitting the explosion of Big Tech tools used by police against state-funded forensics offices staffed by elite public defenders.

Companies developing everything from DNA analysis to autonomous surveillance bots have found a broad customer base: roughly 18,000 police agencies eager for a crime-fighting edge. But there’s no nationally accepted standard for these tools, leaving a key question about the reliability of these technologies: Are they trustworthy enough to clear courts’ high evidence standards?

Lawyers across the country who believe their clients have been wrongly implicated by a new technology are forced to wage individual ...