What happened

Francisco Arteaga was arrested in November 2019 for an armed robbery in New Jersey, USA, that he insists he did not commit.

Before Arteaga was identified as a suspect, New Jersey police found that witnesses at the scene were unable to describe the perpetrator. A facial recognition search run in state by New Jersey turned up no results.

New Jersey detectives then sent surveillance footage to the New York Police Department (NYPD), which  identified Arteaga as a "potential match". 

Based on this, New Jersey police created photo arrays including Arteaga's image, which witnesses subsequently used to identify him as the perpetrator.

Arteaga spent four years in jail awaiting his court case.

Why it happened

The case gained notoriety after it emerged that Arteaga had been refused access to information about the facial recognition system used in his arrest, including how it works, its error rates and source code. 

Facial recognition system have been shown to have higher error rates for certain minority demographic groups, notably people of colour, Black women and trans and nonbinary people, potentially leading to wrongful arrests.

A New Jersy court ruled that the defendant would be deprived of due process rights unless he could access the raw materials police used to identify him and test its reliability to build a defense, and that the inner workings of the software system is vital to impeach witnesses’ identification of him, challenge the state’s investigation, and create reasonable doubt.

The fact that the facial recognition search was conducted by an out-of-state agency for New Jersey police also proved controversial.