To US investigators, the case against Kimberlee Williams appeared straightforward.

“It’s very obvious it’s you,” an officer in Montgomery County, Maryland, said to Williams, who was
handcuffed to a table in the police department.

Williams had several prior convictions for writing bad checks in Oklahoma, and the person who appeared in surveillance photos, accused of making fraudulent withdrawals in Maryland, looked like a match in surveillance photos – the same build, the same age, the same shape face.

But Williams was adamant. That wasn’t her. She lived in Oklahoma and had never been to Maryland, she said, until police arrested her and flew her in to be questioned.

Williams, now 57, offered to take a polygraph test and said she had family members who could provide an alibi for her, according to video of the interview from July 2021 reviewed by The Washington Post. She acknowledged that she had a history of writing bad checks, but she insisted that was in the past.

“I’m not trying to waste your time,” Williams said. “I’m telling you – ”

“You’re telling me, but you’re not telling me the truth,” the officer interrupted.

Williams was charged in three Maryland counties – Montgomery, Prince George’s and Anne Arundel – and jailed for six months before the charges were dismissed, according to court records.

She would not learn for years how she came to be accused: a bank investigator reported to Montgomery County police that facial recognition technology had identified Williams as the suspect in the Maryland fraud cases. Montgomery County police did not disclose that Williams had been identified using facial recognition when they sought charges against her, according to police records.

Several criminal justice experts said the use of facial recognition should have been disclosed in the police department’s incident report and application for charges.

On Tuesday (Wednesday NZT), the American Civil Liberties Union sent letters of complaint to the Montgomery, Prince George’s and Anne Arundel police departments, seeking an apology for Williams and policy changes. The organisation alleges that Montgomery police – which had been informed about the role of facial recognition – maliciously prosecuted Williams by not disclosing the use of the technology in identifying her. The letter also said that all three police agencies did not adequately look into the bank investigator’s tip before charging Williams. (The three–year statute of limitations has expired in her case, according to the ACLU.)

The Montgomery and Prince George’s police departments did not respond to The Post about her case and whether anyone else was ever charged. The Anne Arundel County police declined to answer questions about Williams’ case, but said in a statement that it “independently investigates and corroborates any outside tips and leads it receives before applying for criminal charges”.

“An independent judicial officer – a District Court Commissioner – reviews and evaluates all criminal charges for probable cause to determine whether charges should be issued,” the department said.

Williams’ case, criminal justice experts said, shows the limits of facial recognition software and how faulty tips generated by the technology can be used by both police and non–law–enforcement groups to inform arrests and charges.

“When an officer seeks charges or seeks a warrant without revealing what they’re basing their identification on – without revealing that it was facial recognition technology that produced this lead – they’re essentially hiding or burying the unreliable step in that investigation,” said Mitha Nandagopalan, an attorney for the criminal justice reform non-profit the Innocence Project.

It is not uncommon for corporations and private investigators to share information with police about facial recognition searches, Nandagopalan added. The powerful but error–prone technology has led some police departments to forgo basic investigative steps and arrest people wrongfully identified by facial recognition without other supporting evidence, a Washington Post investigation last year found. Law enforcement agencies often deploy facial recognition software to identify suspects without reporting its use to the accused or their attorneys, The Post reported.

Similar cases to Williams’ continue to crop up. A Tennessee woman was jailed for about six months last year after police in North Dakota identified her as a suspect in a bank fraud case using facial recognition technology, the Grand Forks Herald reported. The charges were dismissed, and the Fargo police department said in a statement that it “conducted additional investigative steps independent of AI” before seeking charges, WCYB reported.

Like Williams, she told police she had never visited the state where she was accused, according to those reports.

Past mistakes

The charges against Williams shocked her, but not because she had never been accused before. It was an echo of a past she had left behind. Williams, a single mother raising seven children, had begun writing fraudulent checks in her own name decades earlier to pay for nappies and other needs for her family that she could not afford, she said.

The amounts started small. Then she wrote larger checks for bigger purchases, such as birthday presents and Christmas gifts. It felt “like an adrenaline rush”, Williams said in an interview.

Williams pleaded guilty to misdemeanours for writing false checks in 2001 and 2004, according to criminal records. In 2010, she pleaded guilty to felony charges of writing multiple bogus checks and conspiracy and spent about two years in prison.

The run–ins with the law weighed on Williams’ family. Her relationship with her children grew strained. Her mother didn’t understand why she couldn’t stop reoffending. After Williams again faced charges for check fraud in 2017, she resolved to change.

“I was just getting older,” she said. “It was just time to quit being so disgusting, doing stuff like that.”

By 2021, Williams had found work as an administrator at a methadone clinic in Lawton, Oklahoma. Her youngest children were attending high school, and her older children lived in the area with their families. She told her grandchildren about her criminal history as a warning to stay out of trouble. Jordyn Wasko, one of Williams’ daughters, said she was beginning to reconcile with her mother.

“We were doing so much better,” said Wasko, now 23.

In June of that year, Williams was stopped at the gatehouse of Fort Sill, a US Army base near Lawton. She and Wasko were visiting the base to deliver a DoorDash order. Shortly after guards checked their IDs, police cars rolled up. An officer told Williams she had felony warrants in Maryland.

Williams was taken to jail. Officers did not tell her what she had been charged with, she said.

“I thought they were joking,” Williams said. “ … I wasn’t even scared, because I was like, ‘I’ve never been to Maryland.’ So I thought if they checked into it enough they would see.”

Finding a suspect

In December 2019, a woman visited a SunTrust bank in Potomac, Maryland, and made two fraudulent cash withdrawals using forged checks that totalled about $17,000, according to police and bank records. Security cameras captured the woman, dressed in a red jacket and smiling at a teller, on the day she made the first withdrawal. She returned the next day with a different hairstyle and outfit, according to photos shared with police.

An investigator employed by SunTrust shared the surveillance photos on CrimeDex, an online community of law enforcement and corporate investigators that enables users to share bulletins on suspects and solicit tips from other agencies.

The investigator wrote to Montgomery County police in March 2020 that he had a suspect: Kimberlee Williams. A respondent to the investigator’s CrimeDex bulletin “suggested, using facial recognition software” that Williams was the suspect, he told police.

It is unclear who sent the tip identifying Williams. Truist, the bank holding company that SunTrust formed in a merger, did not respond to questions.

CrimeDex does not perform facial recognition searches itself but allows other agencies to respond to an investigator who shares suspect information, founder James Hudson said in an interview. He said another CrimeDex user could have performed a facial recognition search from the bank investigator’s bulletin and shared the results with him.

“Comparison of arrest photos against bank surveillance stills resulted in the identification of Williams,” the bank investigator wrote to Montgomery County police.

About a week later, the bank investigator reported Williams to police in the nearby counties of Prince George’s and Anne Arundel; he wrote that a woman who made fraudulent withdrawals in their jurisdictions “was recognised” as Williams from the Montgomery case. The emails to Prince George’s and Anne Arundel police did not disclose the use of facial recognition in identifying Williams.

From the tips, three police departments opened investigations of Williams. In incident reports and charging documents, no officers reported investigating Williams’ whereabouts at the time of the crimes or whether she had connections to Maryland.

Each department charged Williams in 2020 based on the identification reported by the bank investigator and a visual comparison of Williams and the woman in the bank from photos, according to charging documents and incident reports. Police in Montgomery and Anne Arundel also cited Williams’ convictions for check fraud in Oklahoma.

Detective Michael Adami, who applied for charges against Williams in Montgomery County, did not disclose the use of facial recognition in identifying her. Adami did not respond to questions about the case.

A warrant was issued for Williams’ arrest. She faced 16 charges across the three counties, including 12 felonies.

‘That wasn’t me’

Williams was held in jail in Oklahoma for about three weeks before being transported to Maryland. As Montgomery County police interviewed Williams in 2021, her bewilderment at being accused quickly turned to fear, she said.

“I’m like, ‘How do I convince a detective that that wasn’t me?’” Williams said.

Experts and advocates for criminal justice reform who reviewed the case at the request of The Post said Williams’ case typified the missteps that police can take when working with facial recognition technology.

Michael King, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Florida Institute of Technology who has studied facial recognition, said the technology is an invaluable tool. But since it is adept at finding lookalikes to a suspect, he said police must do more than just compare candidates to photos of a suspect when building a case.

“When face recognition is used in an investigation, officers should not only look for evidence that supports probable cause; they should also actively look for evidence that the person identified is not the right suspect,” King said. “That obligation is essential.”

Nandagopalan, from the Innocence Project, criticised Montgomery County police for not stating that facial recognition was used in the investigation, checking Williams’ alibi or gathering evidence to establish that Williams had been in Maryland before charging her.

“Is there sort of some independent basis, not tied to the facial recognition, that we have to suspect this person or that would put them at the scene?” Nandagopalan said. “If we don’t have that, we shouldn’t be making any arrests.”

While Prince George’s and Anne Arundel police were not informed by the bank investigator of the use of facial recognition technology, the ACLU said the agencies should have asked for more details about the tip as they investigated Williams.

Gary Wells, a professor emeritus of psychology at Iowa State University who studies eyewitness identification, added that police made an “egregious” misjudgment by deeming Williams the suspect after a visual comparison of photos. Photos of the two women showed visible differences in their noses, eyes and moles on their faces, he said.

“These are very clearly different people,” Wells said.

Jailed in Montgomery County, Williams said she grew “hysterical” and at a loss for how to fight her charges. On the phone, her 11-year-old granddaughter asked why she wasn’t coming home.

“I said, ‘Sometimes people, the police, can think that you did something, and if you really didn’t do it, sometimes you have to go away to take time to prove that you didn’t,’” Williams said.

Wasko said Williams was helping look after her sister’s children in Oklahoma in December 2020 and January 2021, when the Maryland cases occurred. The Post reviewed signed declarations from three of Williams’ daughters providing an alibi. The ACLU, in its letters to the police departments, shared posts and videos from social media placing Williams in Oklahoma at the time of the crimes.

Prosecutors in all three counties ultimately dismissed the charges against Williams – sequentially, which prolonged her jail time. After Williams was released from jail in Montgomery County in October 2021, she was transferred to a facility in Prince George’s. The two other counties dismissed their charges against Williams in December.

By that point, Williams had no money or means to contact her family, she said. She had to borrow a stranger’s phone to call her son, she said, who drove her home to Oklahoma.

Williams’ case records were expunged, according to the ACLU. In 2024, Maryland passed legislation prohibiting law enforcement agencies from using facial recognition as the sole basis for an arrest and restricting the kinds of cases agencies can use facial recognition technology to investigate.

Wasko, Williams’ daughter, said her mother was depressed after leaving jail and struggled to readjust after the time behind bars.

“She lost a part of herself,” Wasko said.

Williams moved into a rehab facility in Hermitage, Pennsylvania, last year to recover from an episode of Guillain-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune disorder that has weakened her legs. She said she thinks it is possible that illnesses she caught while she was in jail worsened her condition.

But as Williams sat in a wheelchair in her care home’s break room this spring, she was sanguine as she recounted her time in jail. She said her family never doubted that she was telling the truth, and that she had kept her promise to stay out of trouble.

Williams was surprised and fascinated to learn that facial recognition was used to find her, she said. She is still struck by the images of the woman at the bank counter, whom three police departments insisted was her.

“I wish I knew who she was,” Williams said.

– Douglas MacMillan and Razzan Nakhlawi contributed to this report.