It’s a July 2025 morning in rural Tennessee.

Fifty-year-old grandmother Angela Lipps is babysitting four young children at her home.

Then the U.S. Marshals arrive.

They’ve come to arrest her — at gunpoint — not for anything she’s done in Tennessee, but for bank fraud allegedly committed in North Dakota. A state she’s never once visited.

Ms. Lipps would spend the next 108 days in a Tennessee jail cell before being extradited to North Dakota, held there without bail.

Eventually, proof of her innocence turned out to be mundane but irrefutable.

Bank records showed her buying cigarettes at a gas station and ordering pizza via Uber Eats — all in Tennessee — at the exact moment police claimed she was committing fraud in Fargo.

The case was dismissed on Christmas Eve 2025. And Ms. Lipps was released in snowy Fargo, wearing the same summer clothes she was arrested in back in July.

Your Rundown for Wednesday, April 1, 2026...

An AI-Enabled Miscarriage of Justice

How did this happen?

Fargo police were investigating a bank fraud case in which a woman used a fake U.S. Army military ID to withdraw tens of thousands of dollars.

Surveillance video showed the suspect; police ran the footage through facial recognition software — software contracted by the West Fargo PD.

Here’s how the breakdown of due diligence took place:

First, Fargo detectives wrongly assumed their counterparts at West Fargo had also submitted the footage to the state-certified facial recognition hub.

Next, no one from the Fargo Police Department ever called to question Ms. Lipps. Instead, detectives looked at her social media and Tennessee driver’s license photo and concluded she appeared to be the suspect based on facial features, body type and hair color.

The company behind this mockery isn’t some niche AI tool. By 2020, Clearview AI had scraped over 3 billion photos from social media and websites, and held contracts with law enforcement agencies across the country.

Also in 2020, Clearview suffered a major data breach that exposed its entire client list. Company attorney Tor Ekeland’s response was a masterpiece of indifference: “Unfortunately, data breaches are part of life in the 21st century.”

The same company that couldn’t secure its own client list in 2020 is the one whose software put an innocent grandmother behind bars in 2025.

About three months after Ms. Lipps’ release on Christmas Eve, Fargo Police Chief Dave Zibolski issued a public apology — though not to Ms. Lipps directly.

So, one agency ran a scan they weren’t licensed to run. Another agency trusted the result without verifying.

And a grandmother spent nearly six months in jail.

It’s like the worst April Fools’ joke ever, courtesy of AI.

Market Rundown for Wednesday, April 1, 2026

S&P 500 futures are up 0.65% to 6,615.

Oil’s down 1.85% to $99.50 for a barrel of WTI.

Gold is up 2% to $4,741.40 per ounce.

And Bitcoin’s up 0.70% to $68,275.