Court Voids Sentence Over AI Victim Video

Phoenix — An Arizona appeals court has thrown out a prison sentence because the judge who imposed it relied on an artificial-intelligence video that made a dead man appear to speak in court. The court said no Arizona case had addressed whether such videos can be used at sentencing.

The Arizona Court of Appeals upheld Gabriel Paul Horcasitas's manslaughter conviction but vacated, or cancelled, his 10½-year sentence and sent the case back for a new sentencing hearing. The opinion was filed on 30 September and drew national coverage over the weekend.

What happened

In November 2021, Horcasitas shot and killed Christopher Pelkey, 37, during a road-rage confrontation at a red light in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, according to the opinion and NBC News. A jury rejected Horcasitas's claim of self-defense and convicted him of manslaughter, a lesser crime than murder.

At sentencing in May 2025, Pelkey's relatives and friends spoke about him, as Arizona's constitution allows. Victims in Arizona have a right to be heard at sentencing, and they do not testify under oath or face questioning. Then the family played a video made by Pelkey's sister, Stacey Wales, that used AI and Pelkey's photo and voice recordings to create a moving, speaking version of him.

The video said at the start that it was a version of Pelkey "recreated through AI." It then had the AI Pelkey address the man who shot him. "In another life, we probably could have been friends. I believe in forgiveness," it said, NBC reported. It also said the video was "a true representation of who I was."

The trial judge, Todd Lang of Maricopa County Superior Court, responded warmly. "I loved that AI," he said. He called the video "genuine" and said Pelkey had been allowed "to speak from his heart." He then imposed 10½ years, the most the law allowed in the case and more than the nine years prosecutors had asked for.

What the appeals court decided

The court said sentencing judges have wide freedom over what they consider, but due process, the constitutional guarantee of fair procedures, requires that evidence used at sentencing have at least a minimum level of reliability.

Presiding Judge D. Steven Williams, writing for a three-judge panel with Judge Anni Hill Foster and Vice Chief Judge David D. Weinzweig, said the AI video failed that test. Unlike a photograph or a recording, he wrote, it "does not reflect actual events." Instead, "the AI video presents a depiction of the victim and his thoughts created from the imaginings of the victim's sister."

Because it showed those words coming from Pelkey's own face and voice, the court said, the video "erases the interpretive distance between the family's belief about what the victim would have said and the victim's own voice and opinions." The judges added: "No disclaimer could cure that error."

The court found the video "clearly impacted the sentencing judge" and ruled that letting it shape the sentence was a "fundamental error," the label Arizona courts use for a mistake so serious it must be fixed even if the defence did not object at the time. Horcasitas's lawyers had not objected at the hearing.

The ruling had limits. The court said the real video clips of Pelkey that were embedded in the AI video were allowed. It also rejected Horcasitas's separate argument that he should have been allowed to show the jury text messages from Pelkey's phone, and it left the conviction in place.

What happens next

Horcasitas will be sentenced again by the trial court. Under Arizona's constitution, Pelkey's family keeps its right to be heard there. His lawyer, Kristen Reller of the Maricopa County Public Defender's Office, declined to comment on an active case, NBC reported.