An Arizona appeals court vacated a man's 10½-year manslaughter sentence after finding that an AI-generated video of the shooting victim offering forgiveness improperly influenced the judge, who said he "loved" the presentation.
The Arizona Court of Appeals upheld Gabriel Paul Horcasitas's manslaughter conviction but ordered a new sentencing hearing in its Sept. 30 ruling. The decision draws a distinction between authentic recordings of a victim and a digital recreation that puts words written by someone else into the victim's mouth.
"On this record, the judge's consideration of the AI video so prejudiced Horcasitas as to render the sentencing procedure fundamentally unfair," the panel wrote, according to NBC News. "Accordingly, we vacate the sentence for manslaughter and remand for resentencing."
The video depicted Christopher Pelkey, 37, who was fatally shot at a red light in Chandler, near Phoenix, on Nov. 13, 2021. His sister, Stacey Wales, wrote the script, while her husband and a friend used photographs and voice recordings to create the likeness, Reuters previously reported.
Presented at the May 1, 2025, sentencing, the digital Pelkey addressed Horcasitas directly and expressed forgiveness. The words represented what Wales believed her brother would have wanted to say, rather than remarks he had recorded during his lifetime.
Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Todd Lang responded enthusiastically. "I loved that AI," he said, later describing the forgiveness as genuine and thanking the family for allowing Pelkey to speak "from his heart as you saw it."
Lang imposed the maximum manslaughter sentence of 10½ years, exceeding the nine years prosecutors requested. The defense sought seven years, while Pelkey's family had asked for the maximum; Lang also imposed a concurrent two-year, three-month sentence for endangerment.
The appellate judges acknowledged that the record did not reveal precisely how much the recreation affected Lang's sentencing calculation. They nevertheless found that it clearly influenced him, even though the artificial version of Pelkey appeared to favor leniency.
The state defended the presentation as consistent with Pelkey's written beliefs and values and with his sister's understanding of what he would have said. Horcasitas argued that the judge's reliance on the video denied him due process.
The panel concluded that the AI portion was unduly prejudicial because it did not document an actual event. It instead conveyed thoughts imagined by a relative as though they belonged to the deceased man himself; genuine recordings included in the presentation were permissible.
"No Arizona case has addressed the admissibility of an AI-generated depiction of a victim offered as victim impact evidence," the judges wrote, according to Fox 10 Phoenix. The ruling addressed the unfairness of this presentation rather than imposing an outright ban on all AI-generated victim material.
The case had already undergone two trials. After the first jury acquitted Horcasitas of murder but convicted him of manslaughter and endangerment, a judge ordered a retrial over prosecutors' failure to disclose potentially exculpatory material from Pelkey's phone.
