A woman spent months in Maryland jails because of unchecked facial recognition technology

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed complaints against police departments in Montgomery, Prince George’s and Anne Arundel counties, claiming a false identification resulting from a facial recognition technology search led an innocent woman to be jailed for six months.

Kimberlee Williams, an Oklahoma resident, said she had never been to Maryland before she was arrested on an outstanding warrant from Montgomery County while trying to drop off a food delivery order at a military base.

“I was flown there in handcuffs, for a crime I had nothing to do with,” Williams said in an ACLU news release. “My family and I can’t get that time back, but I hope my experience will be a warning to police in Maryland and across the country that this technology can ruin lives. No family deserves to go through that.”

The ACLU said Williams is the 14th person it knows of who was wrongfully arrested because of faulty facial recognition technology.

Williams’ ordeal began when an investigator working for a bank uploaded an image of a suspect who had withdrawn thousands of dollars by impersonating account holders in Maryland branches.

The investigator uploaded the image to a national LISTSERV of police and private investigators called CrimeDex. Someone on the LISTSERV ran the image through facial recognition and sent back Williams’ name and photo as a match.

The bank investigator notified a Montgomery County Police Department detective of the match in a memo, citing “facial recognition software,” and the department obtained an arrest warrant “without any independent investigation,” according to the ACLU.

But that detective in Montgomery County never disclosed how he had come across Williams’ name, according to the ACLU. Instead, he “misleadingly claimed that Ms. Williams had been ‘identified’ as the suspect and that the detective had confirmed the identification by visually comparing a photo of the suspect with an older photo of Ms. Williams.”

Williams spent months in jail before Montgomery County prosecutors dropped the charges against her in October 2021, only to be transferred to Prince George’s County, where she spent another two months, including time in isolation and a jail cell that had feces smeared on the wall, according to the ACLU.

That’s because there were pending charges stemming from the faulty identification in Anne Arundel County and there, according to the ACLU. Those cases were dismissed in December 2021.

The Montgomery County Police Department declined to comment on the ACLU’s complaint, citing an active investigation.

Marc Limansky, a spokesperson for the Anne Arundel County Police Department, said the agency “investigates and corroborates any outside tips and leads it receives before applying for criminal charges.”

The Prince George’s County Police Department did not respond to questions about Williams’ ordeal.

Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, said in an interview that the administrative complaints were “starting points.”

The civil rights group is asking the departments for formal apologies and two policy reforms. First, it wants a ban on the use of facial recognition technology searches conducted by outside parties. Second, the ACLU wants more guardrails for the follow-up investigations that are necessary when police make arrests based on facial recognition results.

“If they’re not willing to work with us, then we will figure out the next steps to secure a measure of justice for Ms. Williams,” Wessler said.

Will the Williams case spur further reforms?

Maryland lawmakers passed legislation in 2024 limiting how police can use facial recognition technology, but ACLU attorneys say the law didn’t go far enough.

The law limits what types of crime police can investigate using the technology and specifies it cannot be used as the sole basis to establish probable cause, among other restrictions.

But it doesn’t detail what type of investigations police must do to verify a result after receiving a lead from facial recognition software.

David Rocah, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Maryland, said he and others raised this issue in the 2024 legislative session, and he hopes the Williams case will prompt lawmakers to strengthen the law.

Sen. Charles Sydnor, a Baltimore County Democrat who spearheaded the 2024 law, said he read about the Williams case and was open to looking into further changes to the legislation.

But he questioned why police didn’t do anything to verify the identification.

The ACLU complaints include public social media posts Williams made while the bank withdrawals occurred that were geotagged near her home in Oklahoma.

“Facial recognition has a part to play in this, but it’s also police work,” Sydnor said. “And how do you fix that?”