Road rage killer is to be resentenced after Arizona court throws out sentence over AI video of victim 'forgiving' him

From the Newshound archive · first published 4 October 2026 · last updated 5 October 2026.

Arizona's Court of Appeals has ordered Gabriel Horcasitas, 55, resentenced after ruling that an AI-generated video of his dead victim forgiving him made his original sentencing "fundamentally unfair". Horcasitas had been jailed for 10 and a half years for the 2021 shooting of US army veteran Christopher Pelkey, 37, at a red light in Chandler, Arizona. The appellate court found the AI clip was "not reliable" and had prejudiced the judge who presided over sentencing.

Pelkey's sister Stacey Wales scripted and built the deepfake video herself, feeding photographs, audio and footage of her brother into AI tools to clone his voice and age his appearance.

The AI Pelkey told the court: 'In another life we could have been friends' — and the sentencing judge said he 'loved the AI' and found the forgiveness 'genuine', remarks the appeals court cited as evidence of bias.

The court ruled the video "erases the interpretive distance" between a family's beliefs and the victim's actual voice, setting a landmark warning on AI evidence in US courtrooms.