Accused in killing of grad student in Downtown Chicago, he's fighting use of facial recognition evidence

Attorneys defending the man accused of killing graduate student Anat Kimchi Downtown in 2021 argued in court Monday that facial recognition technology used to identify him isn't reliable and may have tainted the case.

They called for the pretrial release of Tony Robinson, 45, who has been charged in the unprovoked stabbing at Wacker Drive and Van Buren Street on June 19, 2021.

Cook County Circuit Judge John F. Lyke ruled that Robinson — who is also accused of attacking two other women in the South Loop in the days before Kimchi’s killing — still poses a risk to the community and needs to stay locked up.

"These offenses are highly violent," Lyke said. He added that, although Robinson is presumed innocent, earlier testimony showed he posed "a real and present threat."

The case was one of several examined in a Chicago Sun-Times investigation into violent attacks in the Downtown area in which the accused exhibited symptoms of severe untreated mental illness.

Robinson, who lived in a tent under Lower Wacker Drive, had a history of arrests and bizarre behavior, according to police and court records. According to a police report, Robinson told detectives "he believes people are following him and tracking his location using their cellphones."

His case is believed to be the first in Cook County, and possibly Illinois, in which facial recognition technology has been challenged in court, according to the Cook County public defender's office.

Quandee Semrow, an attorney in the public defender's forensic science division, asked the judge to bar all evidence derived from the use of facial recognition or force the prosecution to provide more information about how it was used.

Semrow said police took a still image of Robinson’s face from an officer’s body camera and ran it through "black box" facial recognition software to get his name from a database of photos. But she said the officer's video was taken after the killing, when the officer saw Robinson picking up objects from the ground. She noted that an eyewitness didn't pick Robinson out of a lineup that included the still photo.

Semrow said images can be manipulated with editing tools that can introduce errors, and those of nonwhite people and women have been shown to have higher error rates.

Lyke voiced skepticism, though, saying it might be a "moot exercise" because the prosecution says it has ample other evidence and won't need to use the facial recognition information.

Prosecutors say the eyewitness knew Robinson from the homeless encampment on Lower Wacker and later correctly identified Robinson in a physical lineup.

"So much of this case is captured on video from around that whole neighborhood," said Assistant State's Attorney Anna Sedelmaier.

Sedelmaier said that includes video of Robinson tossing out his shirt after the killing. It was later recovered, and 98% of the DNA on it belonged to Robinson, she said.

Lyke continued the hearing until Oct. 3, when a police officer is expected to testify about how the technology was used.

The Chicago Police Department has used facial recognition technology for more than a decade. Its first case involved a 2013 mugging on a Chicago Transit Authority Pink Line train. A facial image from a surveillance camera on the train was matched to the suspect after a computer program sorted through 4.5 million booking photos.

In 2018, the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois objected when former Mayor Rahm Emanuel unsuccessfully pushed legislation in Springfield that would have allowed police officers to use drones equipped with the technology to monitor protests.

In 2021, the city ended a contract with a company whose controversial technology allowed police to compare images against a database of billions of photos lifted from popular websites and social media platforms.

Over the years, the police department has used software from a different company to do mugshot matching.

It's unclear how often police use the technology.

In one of the latest cases that made the news, Josalyn Fowler was charged in April with the murder of Kevin Patel in Lincoln Park, based in part on surveillance footage that was run through facial recognition software.

Robinson is accused of sneaking up on Kimchi, 31, a vacationing University of Maryland graduate student, as she walked in the 400 block of South Wacker Drive on a sunny Saturday afternoon. He allegedly grabbed her backpack and stabbed her in the neck with a 7-inch Bowie knife.

Kimchi handed her cellphone to a stranger to call 911 before she died.

She was studying criminal justice, and a college scholarship was posthumously named in her honor.