Facial recognition used after Sunglass Hut robbery led to man's wrongful jailing, says suit

Source: The Guardian

Facial recognition used after Sunglass Hut robbery led to man’s wrongful jailing, says suit

Harvey Eugene Murphy Jr’s lawsuit claims he was misidentified as culprit of armed robbery and put in jail, where he says he was raped

Johana Bhuiyan
Mon 22 Jan 2024 22.02 GMT
Last modified on Mon 22 Jan 2024 22.05 GMT

A 61-year-old man is suing Macy’s and the parent company of Sunglass Hut over the stores’ alleged use of a facial recognition system that misidentified him as the culprit behind an armed robbery that led to his wrongful arrest. While in jail, he was beaten and raped, according to his suit.

Harvey Eugene Murphy Jr was accused and arrested on charges of robbing a Houston-area Sunglass Hut of thousands of dollars of merchandise in January 2022, though his attorneys say he was living in California at the time of the robbery. He was arrested on 20 October 2023, according to his lawyers.

According to Murphy’s lawsuit, an employee of EssilorLuxottica, Sunglass Hut’s parent company, worked with its retail partner Macy’s and used facial recognition software to identify Murphy as the robber. The image that was put through the facial recognition system came from low-quality cameras, according to the lawsuit. While Houston police department was investigating the armed robbery, the EssilorLuxottica employee called police to say they could stop the investigation because the employee had identified one of two robbers with the technology. The employee also said the system had pointed to Murphy as committing two other robberies, according to the lawsuit.

When Murphy returned to Texas from California, he went to the department of motor vehicles to renew his license. There, he was arrested and taken into police custody, per the suit. However, upon learning of the date of the robbery, he was able to provide an alibi, the lawsuit says: he was in Sacramento, California, more than a thousand miles away. His alibi was confirmed by both his court-appointed defense attorney and the prosecutor, and the charges against him were ultimately dropped.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/22/sunglass-hut-facial-recognition-wrongful-arrest-lawsuit