On: US road rage killer's sentence quashed because AI video of victim was shown in...

4 October

A curious item in the morning paper: an Arizona court has thrown out a killer’s sentence because the jury was shown a video in which the murdered man, resurrected by machinery, addressed the courtroom. The judges called it crossing a line. I find myself less interested in the line than in the diagnosis.

Consider the case as a clinician would. One verdict overturned is an anecdote. But the symptom deserves collection: a dead man made to speak, not by witnesses who knew him, but by an instrument that guessed at what he might have said. The jury wept, I am told. Of course they wept. Grief is the oldest lever in the courtroom, and here was a lever of perfect manufacture - a performance with no performer behind it, no cross-examination possible, no pulse to check.

The old rule of evidence was never a pedantry. It exists because testimony can be tested - the witness blushes, hesitates, contradicts himself. A fabricated resurrection offers nothing to test. It is a symptom without a body, and juries are not trained to ask where the body went.

What troubles me more is the confidence of those who made the thing. The family meant well, no doubt; grief improvises. But somewhere a technician assembled a dead man’s face and voice and thought the result was evidence. That is the professional pride I have spent a lifetime hunting - certainty that does not ask itself whether it should exist. The instrument is new; the vanity is very old.

The court, to its credit, refused the charm. One may quibble with the remedy - the man’s conviction stood, only the sentence wavered - but the instinct was sound. A courtroom should be the one room in America where a ghost can be produced and then, firmly, sent back.

Twenty such cases, systematically gathered, and we shall know whether this was an aberration or a beginning. I suspect the latter.