Court throws out killer's sentence after judge said he loved AI video of victim

An Arizona appeals court threw out the 10½-year manslaughter sentence of Gabriel Paul Horcasitas after finding the trial judge had been improperly influenced by an AI-generated video of the slain victim, Christopher Pelkey. Pelkey was shot in a 2021 road-rage incident and Horcasitas was convicted of manslaughter and endangerment. At the 2025 sentencing, Pelkey’s family presented an AI recreation that used his likeness and a synthesized voice to deliver a message of forgiveness; the judge said the presentation moved him and treated it as genuine. Despite the defense urging a lighter punishment and noting Horcasitas’s remorse and otherwise law-abiding life, the judge imposed the maximum term.

On appeal, judges concluded that admitting and relying on the AI video rendered the sentencing process fundamentally unfair and prejudiced Horcasitas, because the video did not document an actual event but was a depiction based on the sister’s imaginings of what Pelkey might have said. The state had argued the video reflected the family’s belief about the victim’s values, but the court found it crossed from permissible victim impact evidence into unduly prejudicial territory. The manslaughter sentence was vacated and the case remanded for resentencing.