Andrew L. Urban
Another title could be “You can’t make this stuff up!” And we didn’t. Or you could file it under ‘Truth is stranger than fiction’. We have been inspired by real events to draft these story lines. Sadly, there are no happy endings … yet.
By the reduction of these stories to the bare-bones outlines, we concentrate their key ingredients, much like cooks do to soups and sauces. The purpose is to expose the ingredients that spoil the broth.
12 Gullible Men
The imaginative prosecutor
A man missing from his new yacht overnight is declared murdered by police and they arrest his middle aged wife. The prosecutor takes up the story, telling the jury how exactly she did it; no plausible motive is argued. Although neither the body or a murder weapon is ever found, the prosecutor details how the woman was murdered and how the wife then bundled the corpse into their dinghy, before dumping it into the water. The prosecutor even tells the jury what sort of injuries the man’s body may show. DNA found on the deck of the yacht is declared a ‘red herring’ by the prosecutor. The jury convicts the woman. She is sentenced to 23 years in prison. As the credits roll, police officers congratulate the prosecutor as the smiling judge passes by, waving to them.
Fall Guy
Never mind the alibi
After three adults and two pre-teen boys of a suburban family are found brutally murdered, police spend two years searching unsuccessfully for suspects. Finally, in frustration, they build a hypothetical case to charge the husband of the dead father’s sister. When confronted with the man’s alibi, they scheme to negate it in the jury’s mind, including a distorted covert recording by a prison snitch. But the prosecution cannot prove the accused was at the crime scene, and cannot put forward a motive. In the final scene, after the jury delivers its guilty verdict, the accused stands up and declares “I’m innocent!”
The room that wasn’t there
A room without a view
A much admired sportsman, sport coach, successful developer and generous philanthropist is charged with historical sexual abuse of a minor. The complainant, now a mature woman, is a relative by marriage, who enjoyed his generosity – until it ceased. She makes it clear she would exact revenge; what better than allegations of sexual abuse… Her claims are over 20 years old, a time when she lived in the same household. But in her statements to police she refers to an incident that took place in a room that wasn’t built at the time. A combination of police failures, prosecutorial misconduct and judicial error sends the man to jail and a place on the sexual offenders register. The film is narrated by the lawyer for the accused, ending with a note of hope that the conviction can be quashed due to the presence of that false testimony, as well as contradictory fabricated admissions – and the judge’s false statement to the jury that the accused had “made admissions”. The film ends with the lawyer opening the door to the court, turning back towards the camera and making a positive gesture.
Tracks to hell
Veering off the truth
In the opening scene, a young divorced father is driving along a country road with his three young sons after a Macdonald’s dinner. When he has a coughing fit and temporarily loses consciousness, the car veers off the road and into a dam, where it begins to sink. We cut to a courtroom, where the prosecution is telling the jury that the man, after escaping from the car, had deliberately drowned his children. We cut to an investigative engineer showing how the tracks of the car after it left the road support the father’s claim. As the credits roll, we see the father and his former wife tearfully consoling each other at the boys’ funeral.
***
But now there may be a glimmer of hope for innocents accused of serious crime: the next iteration of AI. Perhaps the sequels to the above will have happy endings.
“We’ve spent the past decade watching LLMs become faster and larger, but not more trustworthy, ” says Adrian Bertino-Clarke, who founded LIA, the Legal Intel AI. “That is unsustainable, and you’d be absolutely right to question it. Where I think the conversation needs reframing is this: The real threat is probabilistic ‘black-box’ AI being used in high-stakes settings without auditability, not the existence of AI as a field. There is a completely different model emerging, which is what my team is building:
AI that must justify every claim
AI that cannot hallucinate without being caught
AI whose reasoning is transparent, inspectable, and evidence-based
AI that is admissible in court because it behaves like an expert witness, not a guess-generator.”
AI doesn’t replace lawyers: it augments them. Faster (hence less costly), more thorough and legally informed argument otherwise out of reach of humans. We’ll report in more detail and depth as soon as we have the relevant information.