Angela Lipps Lawsuit: Planned Claims, Errors, and Damages

Angela Lipps’s attorneys have announced plans to file a federal civil rights lawsuit against the Fargo Police Department after she spent more than five months in jail on charges built on a faulty facial recognition match, but as of May 2026 no complaint had been filed. The legal team, Eric Rice and Dane DeKrey, said they remained in the investigative phase, hampered by records refusals from every agency involved.¹

What the Planned Lawsuit Will Claim

Rice and DeKrey have publicly identified the core of the case as a Fourth Amendment violation: illegal arrest and wrongful detention. The vehicle would be a federal civil rights claim under Section 1983, paired with North Dakota state law causes of action for false arrest, false imprisonment, and malicious prosecution.²

Rice framed the broader purpose of the suit in a public statement: “I hope Angela’s matter can serve as a warning to law enforcement to not use AI as a shortcut.”³

Why Nothing Has Been Filed Yet

The delay traces to records. DeKrey told the Twin Cities Pioneer Press that the Fargo Police Department, the West Fargo Police, and the North Dakota State and Local Intelligence Center had all refused to share records, citing ongoing investigations. The legal team has instead been working from the now-closed Cass County State’s Attorney’s case file and public statements by law enforcement officials.¹

To keep material from disappearing while they investigate, Lipps’s attorneys served preservation letters on the involved agencies.⁴

The Fargo Police Department has continued to describe the underlying fraud investigation as “open and active” and has referred to Lipps as a person it is still investigating, a characterization her attorneys strongly contest. The department has not apologized.³⁵

The Chain of Errors the Suit Will Point To

The facts Lipps’s attorneys will build on begin with a West Fargo bank fraud investigation. Someone used a fake U.S. Army military ID to commit fraud, and the West Fargo Police Department, a Clearview AI user since 2020, ran the image from the fake ID through the software. Clearview returned Lipps, a 50-year-old grandmother in Elizabethton, Tennessee, as a “potential suspect with similar features.”⁶

West Fargo passed the report to Fargo. Fargo detectives assumed the West Fargo report included surveillance photos of the actual crimes. It did not; the Clearview match had been run against the fake ID photo. A Fargo detective then compared the AI result to Lipps’s social media accounts and Tennessee driver’s license photo and designated her as the suspect.⁷ No one checked whether Lipps had ever traveled to North Dakota. No one reviewed bank records or other alibi evidence.

Fargo Police Chief Dave Zibolski later acknowledged the department also failed to submit the surveillance photos to the North Dakota State and Local Intelligence Center, a state agency certified and trained in facial recognition analysis. He described “a couple of errors” but said he found no evidence of “malicious or intentional conduct.”⁶⁸

On July 1, 2025, a North Dakota judge signed an arrest warrant with nationwide extradition authority. On July 14, U.S. Marshals arrested Lipps at gunpoint at her Carter County, Tennessee home while she was babysitting four children. She faced four counts of unauthorized use of personal identifying information and four counts of theft in Cass County, North Dakota.⁹¹⁰

Because she was classified as a “fugitive from justice,” Lipps was held without bail.¹¹ She spent 108 days in a Tennessee county jail before being extradited to North Dakota on October 30, 2025. Police did not interview her about the fraud allegations until December 19, 2025, more than five months after her arrest.¹²

When her defense attorney finally produced bank records showing Lipps had been making purchases in Tennessee at a gas station and ordering pizza at the exact time police claimed she was committing fraud in Fargo, the case collapsed. On December 23, 2025, the Fargo detective, the state’s attorney, and the presiding judge mutually agreed to dismiss the charges, and Lipps was released on Christmas Eve.⁷⁶

The dismissal was without prejudice, meaning the charges could theoretically be refiled — one reason the department’s refusal to close the file matters to the pending suit.

An email obtained by Valley News Live added another fact the lawsuit is likely to rely on: six Fargo detectives were notified of Lipps’s arrest in July 2025, five months earlier than the department initially claimed to have been aware she was in custody.³

The Damages Lipps Will Claim

Lipps, a mother of three and grandmother of five, described devastating losses in a GoFundMe campaign set up after her release. During her incarceration she lost her rental home in a mobile home park, her car, her Social Security income, her health insurance, and her dog. Her family placed her belongings in a storage unit, but the bills went unpaid and everything was sold off.¹³ She reported gaining 65 pounds from fluid retention and poor diet in jail and said she was denied her dentures while incarcerated.¹⁴

When authorities released her, they provided no money and no assistance getting back to Tennessee. Adam Martin, CEO of the F5 Project, drove her to Chicago so she could complete the trip home.¹⁵ As of spring 2026, Lipps was living with neighbors in a trailer park.

Fargo’s Posture Toward the Suit

The city of Fargo appears to be preparing for litigation. In March 2026, the Fargo Board of City Commissioners held a closed-door executive session to receive legal advice regarding “reasonably predictable or pending civil or criminal litigation” involving Lipps.¹⁶ No public details about the city’s legal strategy or any settlement discussions have emerged.

Inside the department, no officers had been publicly disciplined as of mid-2026. An internal review had not concluded, and Zibolski indicated it was “possible there may be no disciplinary action.”⁸ The department has adopted a new internal policy, Policy 610, stating that facial recognition results “shall not be used as the sole basis for identification to establish probable cause in a criminal investigation.”¹⁷ Because North Dakota has no state law regulating police use of facial recognition, that internal policy is the primary local guardrail.¹⁸

Comparable Settlements as Benchmarks

Two prior wrongful-arrest suits offer the closest reference points for what a Lipps settlement or judgment might look like. Robert Williams, wrongfully arrested in Detroit in 2020, reached a $300,000 settlement with the city in 2024. The agreement also required Detroit police to obtain independent corroborative evidence before seeking arrest warrants based on AI-generated identifications. Nijeer Parks, arrested in Woodbridge, New Jersey in 2019 despite DNA and fingerprint evidence pointing to a different person, also settled for $300,000 in 2024.¹⁹

Lipps’s more than five months of incarceration significantly exceeds the detention periods in those earlier cases, a factor her attorneys are likely to press when calculating damages. The ACLU has documented at least 14 people in the United States wrongfully arrested based on erroneous facial recognition results, with a recurring pattern: police treat an AI-generated lead as near-certain identification, skip basic corroboration steps such as checking alibis, and pursue arrest warrants on thin evidence.²⁰

1
Twin Cities Pioneer Press. AI Facial Recognition Fargo Police
2
WJHL. Attorney for Carter County Woman Mistakenly Jailed Talks Potential Lawsuit
3
Valley News Live. Attorney Discusses Potential Lawsuit After Tennessee Grandmother Jailed by Facial Recognition Error
4
KFGO. Agencies Served With Preservation Letters on Behalf of Angela Lipps
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New York Times. North Dakota Facial Recognition AI Errors Bank Fraud
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CNN. Angela Lipps AI Facial Recognition
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Reason. Fargo Police Refuse to Apologize to Tennessee Grandma Jailed on Bogus AI Evidence
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KFGO. Fargo Police Admit to Errors in Angela Lipps Investigation
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WSMV. East TN Grandmother Mistakenly Jailed Months After AI Identified Her
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WJHL. Carter County Woman Mistakenly Jailed for Bank Fraud in North Dakota
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FindLaw. Grandmother Held Without Bail After AI Software Error
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Upper Michigan’s Source. Grandmother Says She Was Wrongfully Put in Jail
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InForum. Tennessee Grandma Wrongly Imprisoned Sets Up GoFundMe
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GoFundMe. Innocent Grandmother Jailed 6 Months by AI Error
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KVRR. GoFundMe Created for Angela Lipps
16
Valley News Live. Fargo City Commissioners Meet in Executive Session Over Litigation Involving Angela Lipps
17
City of Fargo. Policy 610: Facial Recognition Technology Use
18
Biometric Update. US Woman Jailed 5 Months After Facial Recognition Mismatch
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Washington Post. Police Artificial Intelligence Facial Recognition
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ACLU. More Than a Dozen Wrongful Arrests Due to Police Reliance on Facial Recognition Technology