Arizona court tosses 10.5-year sentence over AI victim video

The Arizona Court of Appeals vacated a 10.5-year manslaughter sentence on September 30, 2026, holding that the sentencing judge's reliance on an AI-generated video of the dead victim made the hearing fundamentally unfair, and remanded the case for resentencing.

The published opinion in State v. Horcasitas, No. 1 CA-CR 25-0191, was written by Presiding Judge D. Steven Williams and joined by Judge Anni Hill Foster and Vice Chief Judge David D. Weinzweig. The court affirmed Gabriel Paul Horcasitas's manslaughter conviction and did not disturb the concurrent 2.25-year term he received on a count of endangerment, according to the opinion. Only the manslaughter sentence falls.

Horcasitas shot and killed Christopher Pelkey, 37, during a road rage confrontation at a Chandler intersection in November 2021. A jury rejected his self-defense claim and convicted him of manslaughter. At the May 2025 sentencing, Pelkey's family played a video that Pelkey's sister, Stacey Wales, had scripted and that used his photograph and a voice profile built from recordings of him, the Associated Press reported. Real footage of Pelkey was embedded inside it, including a clip of him fishing.

The opinion describes the video's own framing: the AI figure opened by calling itself a "version" of the victim "recreated through AI that use[d] [his] picture and [his] voice profile," and later described itself as "a true representation of who [he] was . . . not how the courtroom portrayed [him]." It told Horcasitas, "I believe in forgiveness and in God who forgives."

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Todd Lang reacted to it from the bench. "I loved that AI," the opinion records him saying, adding that he found it "genuine" and that the family had "allowed [the victim] to speak from his heart as you saw it." He then imposed 10.5 years and said, "That's more than the State asked for."

Horcasitas's lawyer, Kristen Reller, argued that the recreation carried an authority a family member reading the same words aloud would not have, and that the video never disclosed who wrote the words attributed to the victim. The State answered that the video was reliable because it reflected what Wales believed her brother would have said, because the two were close, and because the sentiments matched his written account of his beliefs, which his brother read to the court.

The panel rejected that. Victim impact evidence is allowed at sentencing, it wrote, but it still has to be reliable enough to satisfy due process. A photograph or a real recording documents something that happened; this video, the court found, "does not reflect actual events" but "presents a depiction of the victim and his thoughts created from the imaginings of the victim's sister." It "erases the interpretive distance between the family's belief about what the victim would have said and the victim's own voice and opinions." The court's line on the disclosure problem is blunt: "No disclaimer could cure that error."

Because Horcasitas's trial counsel did not object when the video played, the panel reviewed the issue for fundamental error rather than under the standard for a preserved objection, and still found the error severe enough to reverse. On the record, it wrote, "there is no question it played a role."

The opinion is careful about what it does not decide. It says the embedded real footage of Pelkey was permissible, and it treats the AI-generated portions as the problem. It does not decide whether an AI depiction could ever be presented at sentencing if it were disclosed in advance and challenged, and it does not address AI-generated material offered as evidence at trial. The panel describes the case as the first in Arizona to address an AI-generated depiction of a victim offered as victim impact evidence.

The case returns to Maricopa County Superior Court for resentencing on the manslaughter count; the appellate docket lists a petition for review to the Arizona Supreme Court as due October 30, 2026.