The post Courts Were Already Getting Video Evidence Wrong. AI Will Make That Look Like A Warm-Up. appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

video and photo evidence will never be the same again. getty A man spent more than five years in prison for a double murder he didn’t commit. Not because the evidence was planted. Not because witnesses lied. Because a trial judge looked at pixelated surveillance footage, compared it to photos of the defendant, and decided the blurry figure on screen was the shooter. No forensic video examiner was retained. No scientific methodology was applied. The judge simply looked. In January, the Alberta Court of Appeal unanimously overturned Gerald Benn’s two murder convictions in R. v. Benn, finding what it called “serious flaws” in the trial judge’s analysis. The CCTV footage was low-resolution and pixelated. The trial judge acknowledged as much, then went ahead and drew identification conclusions from it anyway, conducting his own visual comparison without any of the training, tools, or protocols that forensic video analysis requires. The appellate court’s full ruling covered more ground than the video analysis alone, but the video failure is what matters here. A judge evaluated pixelated surveillance footage without forensic methodology, without a qualified examiner, and without the sequencing that prevents a predetermined conclusion from driving the result. That single gap contributed to a verdict the appeals court found unreasonable. It also isn’t rare. Video Evidence Was Never Self-Explanatory The Benn case comes out of Canada, but the evidentiary gap it exposes is not a Canadian problem. A 2025 report from the University of Colorado Boulder’s Visual Evidence Lab found that more than 80 percent of U.S. court cases now involve video evidence to some degree. Yet there are no mandatory federal standards governing how that evidence should be analyzed. NIST’s forensic video examination workflow standard remains in proposed form, not finalized, not required. The Department of Justice has published Uniform Language for…

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Filed under: News - @ February 26, 2026 11:24 pm