[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Sign-in] [Mail] [Setup] [Help] [Register]
Status: Not Logged In; Sign In
Science/Tech See other Science/Tech Articles Title: How a Facial Recognition Mismatch Can Ruin Your Life LOSING FACE IT WAS JUST after sundown when a man knocked on Steve Talleys door in south Denver. The man claimed to have hit Talleys silver Jeep Cherokee and asked him to assess the damage. So Talley, wearing boxers and a tank top, went outside to take a look. Seconds later, he was knocked to the pavement outside his house. Flash bang grenades detonated, temporarily blinding and deafening him. Three men dressed in black jackets, goggles, and helmets repeatedly hit him with batons and the butts of their guns. He remembers one of the men telling him, So you like to fuck with my brothers in blue! while another stood on his face and cracked two of his teeth. Youve got the wrong guy, he remembers shouting. You guys are crazy. Talley was driven to a Denver detention center, where he was booked for two bank robberies the first on May 14 and the second on September 5, 2014, 10 days before his arrest and for assaulting an officer during the second robbery. Surveillance footage from a robbery that occurred on May 14, 2014, at a U.S. Bank in Denver, Colorado. After surveillance camera images of the September robbery were publicly distributed, three of Talleys acquaintances called in with tips to the police hotline, noting similarities between Talleys appearance and the robbers. A detective then showed photographs of both the May and September robber to Talleys estranged ex-wife. That is Steven, she told him. That is my ex-husband. The identifications justified Talleys detention, even though he claimed he had been at work as a financial adviser for Transamerica Capital when the May robbery took place. Talley said he was held for nearly two months in a maximum security pod and was released only after his public defender obtained his employers surveillance records. In a time-stamped audio recording from 11:12 a.m. on the day of the May robbery, Talley could be heard at his desk trying to sell mutual funds to a potential client. Nine miles north, a white male wearing a black baseball cap, red athletic jacket, white shorts, and black sneakers entered a U.S. Bank, where he threatened the teller, hid $2,475 in his shirt, wrestled with an off-duty officer, and jumped down a flight of 10 stairs to the parking lot. At the same time as Talley was trying to close a deal, parking lot surveillance tapes show the robber tumbling with the officer, escaping his grip, and jogging away. Talley was released in November, and the charges were apparently dropped. In the months that followed, a series of medical exams revealed that Talley had sustained several injuries on the night of his arrest, including a broken sternum, several broken teeth, four ruptured disks, blood clots in his right leg, nerve damage in his right ankle, and a possibly fractured penis. I didnt even know you could break a penis, he told me. But while voice recordings had exculpated Talley, an appeal to other, seemingly objective markers of his identity would soon be used to implicate him again. Nearly a year after his release from jail, Talley was arrested a second time on December 10, 2015, and charged with the aggravated bank robbery that had taken place the morning of September 5, 2014. This time around, Denver prosecutors obtained what looked like damning forensic evidence of their own. The detective assigned to Talleys case, Jeffery Hart, had requested that an FBI facial examiner manually compare stills from the banks grainy surveillance videos to several pictures of Talley a tall, broad-shouldered white man with short blond hair, mild blue eyes, and a square jaw. The FBI analysis concluded that Talleys face did not match the May robbers, but that he and the September robber shared multiple corresponding characteristics, including the shape of the head, chin, jaw line, mole marks, and ear features. The questioned individual depicted in the September images, the report concluded, appears to be Talley. Except that it wasnt. Again. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
|
||
[Home]
[Headlines]
[Latest Articles]
[Latest Comments]
[Post]
[Sign-in]
[Mail]
[Setup]
[Help]
[Register]
|