Industry News August 24, 2025
Florida Cop’s $58M Malicious Prosecution Award Survives Challenge
What to watch for now Punitive damages stand. The court said jurors had a solid basis to conclude the trooper…
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[post_content] => By SAMUEL LOPEZ | USA HERALD — August 24, 2025
Chicago — The Home Depot is staring down a new class action that says the retailer quietly turned its self-checkout cameras into biometric capture devices, logging shoppers’ facial geometry without the written notices and consent Illinois law requires.
Filed Friday, Aug. 1, the complaint by Illinois shopper Benjamin Jankowski alleges the hardware chain deployed “computer vision”—a form of artificial intelligence—to mitigate theft by analyzing faces. In one image attached to the filing, a rectangular box appears around Jankowski’s head on a self-checkout screen, which his lawyers say is evidence that scans of facial geometry were “collected, captured, used, and/or stored” during his visit. The lawsuit asserts that no written notice, policy, or consent was provided before the scan occurred.
“Because Home Depot utilizes facial recognition technology, BIPA requires that it: (1) make publicly available written policies containing retention schedules or guidelines for permanently destroying these facial-geometry scans and (2) obtain its customers’ informed, written consent before collecting and disclosing the facial scans. Home Depot does neither,” the complaint alleges.
Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) is one of the strictest privacy laws in the country. In plain English, if a business in Illinois wants to capture biometrics—like a scan of facial geometry—it must do a few things before it happens:
- Tell you, in writing, what they’re collecting and why.
- Say how long they’ll keep it and when they’ll destroy it.
- Get your written consent first.
BIPA also creates a private right of action—meaning everyday people can sue. Statutory damages can reach $1,000 per negligent violation and $5,000 per reckless or intentional one, plus attorneys’ fees. Multiply that across thousands of shoppers and the numbers escalate quickly. For retailers, the combination of self-checkout cameras and AI-assisted analysis is a legal tripwire if notice and consent are not airtight.
Expect a fight over what the cameras were actually doing. A bounding box on a screen suggests face detection(software noticing “a face-shaped thing” to center an image), which retailers may argue does not equal a “scan of facial geometry” under BIPA. Plaintiffs will counter that the system measured and stored unique facial data points to identify or track individuals—squarely within BIPA’s scope.
That hairline distinction—detection vs. recognition vs. analysis—often decides whether a case survives the first round of motions.
What happens next
Procedurally, here’s the likely path:
- Initial response:Home Depot may move to dismiss, arguing (for example) that the tech didn’t create biometric identifiers, that any vendor—not the retailer—controlled data, or that signage and store policies satisfied BIPA.
- Discovery:Emails, vendor contracts, kiosk specs, configuration files, retention settings, and internal policies become crucial. Who stored the data? For how long? Was it ever shared?
- Class certification:The court will decide whether common questions for all Illinois shoppers predominate over individual issues, a make-or-break moment in BIPA litigation.
- Merits or settlement pressure:If the case survives, statutory damages math and litigation costs can drive negotiations.
As a legal analyst, these are the elicitation-style specifics I’d push for—answers here usually separate allegation from liability:
- Exact functionality:Was the system configured for facial recognition (identity) or face analytics (patterns), and were templates stored?
- Data trail:What logs, hashes, or templates exist per shopper? Where are they stored, and for how long?
- Written artifacts:Where is the public retention/destruction policy and the written consent workflow? If consent was embedded in signage, what did it say and where was it posted?
- Vendor role:Which third-party platforms were involved? Who trained the models, who controlled retention, and what did the service contracts promise about deletion and sharing?
- Scope & timeframe:Which Illinois stores, which kiosks, and since when? Precision here affects class size and exposure.
For Illinois shoppers:
If you used self-checkout at a Home Depot in Illinois, BIPA gives you concrete rights. In practice, that means:
- You should be able tofind a posted policy explaining retention and destruction of any biometric data.
- You must beasked for written consent before any scan of facial geometry is collected.
- If scans were taken without those steps, BIPA lets individualsseek statutory damages in court.
This lawsuit claims none of those requirements were met. Home Depot, for its part, will likely contend that the technology didn’t capture biometric identifiers at all—or that appropriate disclosures existed. Those competing narratives are exactly what Illinois courts scrutinize under BIPA.
For now, millions of Illinois shoppers may want to think twice before assuming that self-checkout selfie is just between them and their phone.
[post_title] => Home Depot Faces Class Action Over Alleged Facial Recognition Scans In Illinois [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => home-depot-faces-class-action-over-alleged-facial-recognition-scans-in-illinois [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-08-24 11:19:44 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-08-24 16:19:44 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://usaherald.com/?p=76912 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [1] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 76908 [post_author] => 1139 [post_date] => 2025-08-24 01:10:44 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-08-24 06:10:44 [post_content] =>What to watch for now
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Punitive damages stand. The court said jurors had a solid basis to conclude the trooper misrepresented or omitted material facts in warrant papers with at least reckless disregard for the truth. That supports the $10M punitive hit against him.
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No absolute cloak for the ex-prosecutor. Actions taken outside a classic prosecutorial role don’t get absolute immunity, the judge reiterated in refusing relief for the former AAG.
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A rare accountability case. The near-$60M total reflects $33.4M compensatory plus $25M punitive ($10M vs. Busacca; $15M vs. Kolodziej) — an unusual outcome given the hurdles of immunity defenses.
DETROIT — A federal judge refused Friday to overturn a $58 million jury verdict for a Florida police officer who proved his ex-wife and two Michigan officials conspired to frame him on false child sexual abuse charges, dealing a final blow to defendants who claimed immunity from the massive damages award.
U.S. District Judge Stephen J. Murphy III denied post-trial motions from Michigan State Police trooper David Busacca and former Assistant Attorney General Brian Kolodziej, who had argued they deserved qualified and absolute immunity, respectively, from Sean MacMaster's successful malicious prosecution lawsuit.
The August 12 verdict awarded MacMaster $33.4 million in compensatory damages and $25 million in punitive damages after a three-week trial that exposed how personal relationships and prosecutorial misconduct destroyed a police lieutenant's career and landed him in solitary confinement for 151 days on fabricated charges.
MacMaster, formerly a lieutenant with the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office, sued in 2021 after prosecutors dismissed all charges against him in December 2019. His complaint detailed how his ex-wife Johanna MacMaster falsely accused him of sexually abusing their 4-year-old daughter during a bitter custody dispute, then leveraged her family connection to Kolodziej to trigger a bogus criminal investigation.
Court records show Johanna MacMaster's cousin was romantically involved with Kolodziej, who reached out to trooper Busacca in 2018 to investigate the allegations despite the case falling outside his official duties as an assistant attorney general. The investigation proceeded even after the child admitted to lying about the abuse allegations.
Judge Murphy's Friday order rejected Busacca's qualified immunity defense, finding the trooper "had evidence that the abuse allegations were bogus, but he pressed forward nevertheless." The court determined Busacca "misrepresented or omitted material facts from his affidavit and arrest warrant application intentionally, deliberately, or with reckless disregard for the truth."
"He hid material evidence from judges, swallowed his own doubts about the case, and let others change his police report to cover up the origins of the case," Murphy wrote. "All told, the facts justify an award of punitive damages."
The judge also maintained his earlier ruling that absolute prosecutorial immunity didn't protect Kolodziej because he acted outside his prosecutorial role. Kolodziej, who has since been disbarred, resigned from the attorney general's office after revelations he was having a sexual relationship with a complainant in an unrelated case.
MacMaster's arrest in Florida made national news in May 2019 before he was extradited to Michigan and held in solitary confinement pending trial. Though he eventually regained his position with the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office, he returned at a lower rank with substantially reduced pay, according to court filings.
The case represents one of the larger malicious prosecution verdicts on record against individual government officials, reflecting growing judicial willingness to hold law enforcement accountable for constitutional violations. The $58.4 million award includes $10 million in punitive damages against Busacca and $15 million against Kolodziej.
Both defendants can still appeal the verdict to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Their attorneys did not respond to requests for comment Friday evening.
MacMaster is represented by Joshua A. Blanchard and Melissa Freeman of Blanchard Law. Kolodziej is represented by Peter W. Peacock of Peacock Law PC. Busacca is represented by Audrey J. Forbush, Michael Dean Hanchett and Regan Glenn of Plunkett Cooney.
The case is Sean MacMaster v. David Busacca et al., case number 2:21-cv-11052, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan.
[post_title] => Florida Cop's $58M Malicious Prosecution Award Survives Challenge [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => florida-cops-58m-malicious-prosecution-award-survives-challenge [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-08-24 01:10:44 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-08-24 06:10:44 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://usaherald.com/?p=76908 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [2] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 76905 [post_author] => 1139 [post_date] => 2025-08-24 00:22:01 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-08-24 05:22:01 [post_content] =>By SAMUEL LOPEZ | USA HERALD LEGAL CORRESPONDENT USA HERALD (August 23, 2025)
The courtroom confession arrived Friday with all the calculated precision of a closing argument: Nadine Menendez, wife of the disgraced former U.S. Senator, wants just "one year and one day" behind bars. It's a number that sounds almost quaint until you remember she was convicted on 15 federal corruption counts in a bribery scheme so brazen it featured gold bars stashed like pirate treasure and a Mercedes-Benz convertible as the cherry on top of a very expensive sundae.
But this isn't just another white-collar defendant pleading for mercy. This is political theater with real consequences, playing out in the Southern District of New York where federal judges have seen every sob story in the book—and know the difference between genuine mitigation and courtroom performance art.
The Trauma Defense Meets Federal Sentencing Reality
Nadine Menendez's legal team is rolling out what I call the "Perfect Storm Defense"—a carefully orchestrated narrative mixing childhood trauma in war-torn Lebanon, generational misogyny, and a lifetime of abuse by powerful men. It's compelling, it's heartbreaking, and it might actually work. Here's why that should terrify anyone who believes in equal justice under law.
"She is not the caricature the government and the press make her out to be," her redacted filing declares. Translation: forget the evidence, focus on the victim narrative. The filing paints a picture of a woman "taught to obey and serve the men around her" who was repeatedly abused and conditioned to center her entire existence around male approval.
It's a defense strategy that's becoming increasingly common in federal court—and increasingly effective. But it raises uncomfortable questions about how trauma narratives can be weaponized in courtrooms where the average defendant doesn't have access to high-powered legal teams capable of crafting such sophisticated psychological profiles.
When Co-Conspirators Become Character Witnesses
Perhaps the most audacious element of this sentencing strategy? A letter from her husband Robert—the former senator currently serving 11 years at Allenwood Federal Correctional Institution—essentially throwing his own defense team under the bus to rehabilitate his wife's image.
"Nadine is not the person who prosecutors, or for that fact, what the defense attorneys made her out to be," he writes from his federal prison cell. It's a remarkable admission that his lawyers portrayed his wife negatively during his own trial, and it exposes the ugly reality of white-collar criminal defense: sometimes saving yourself means sacrificing your co-conspirators.
Robert Menendez now claims his lawyers wrongly suggested Nadine was "money hungry" or an "empty suit," despite her NYU degrees and business experience. But here's the legal reality: defense attorneys don't make those arguments in a vacuum. They make them because the evidence supports them, or because they're trying to create reasonable doubt about their client's knowledge and intent.
The former senator's prison-penned mea culpa reads more like damage control than genuine contrition.
The Government's Golden Evidence Problem
Let's talk about those gold bars—because in federal corruption cases, the physical evidence often tells the story better than any witness testimony. Prosecutors didn't just find some loose change in couch cushions. They discovered gold bars and cash-filled envelopes in the Menendez home, the kind of evidence that makes jury deliberations remarkably short.
But Nadine Menendez's team is making a play that goes beyond disputing the evidence. They're arguing the evidence doesn't matter because she was psychologically incapable of making rational decisions due to her traumatic background. It's a defense that essentially says: "Yes, she did it, but she's not responsible because of who she is, not what she chose to do."
Judge Stein's Dilemma: Precedent vs. Compassion
U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein finds himself in the unenviable position of balancing federal sentencing guidelines against a defendant whose legal team has crafted perhaps the most sophisticated victimization narrative I've seen in two decades covering federal courts.
Stein already rejected Nadine Menendez's post-trial motions, stating bluntly that "the jury's verdict in this trial of Nadine Menendez was fully supported by the extensive witness testimony and documentary evidence." That's judicial speak for: the evidence was overwhelming and your legal arguments were meritless.
But sentencing is different. It's where federal judges have discretion, where human stories matter, where the difference between 12 months and 120 months can turn on how effectively lawyers can reframe their client's narrative.
The Systemic Problem with Selective Justice
Here's what bothers me about this entire spectacle: Nadine Menendez is receiving the kind of legal advocacy that most federal defendants can only dream about. Her team at Cozen O'Connor has crafted a mitigation package that would make any public defender weep with envy.
"She has been taken advantage of by powerful men her entire life," attorney Sarah Krissoff declared Friday. It's a compelling argument, but it raises uncomfortable questions about justice in America's two-tiered legal system.
How many defendants in federal court have experienced trauma? How many grew up in war zones, faced abuse, or made poor decisions under the influence of powerful people? The difference is that most of them don't have legal teams capable of transforming their pain into sophisticated legal arguments.
What September 11th Really Means
When Judge Stein sentences Nadine Menendez on September 11th, he'll be making a statement about more than just this case. He'll be deciding whether federal corruption law applies equally to defendants who can afford to repackage their crimes as trauma responses, or whether justice in America's federal courts is ultimately about who can tell the most compelling story.
The evidence in this case isn't in dispute. The gold bars were real. The Mercedes convertible was real. The mortgage assistance was real. The only question now is whether a sophisticated victim narrative can transform a federal corruption conviction into a mere slap on the wrist.
That's not justice. That's just expensive theater with real consequences for anyone who still believes that equal treatment under law means something more than equal access to high-priced legal storytelling.
The case is U.S. v. Nadine Menendez, case number 1:23-cr-00490, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
What jumped out at me
- A first-of-its-kind moment — a four-minute AI “avatar” of the deceased spoke in a Phoenix courtroom, turning a routine sentencing into a live ethics lab.
- The defense says the video nudged the judge toward a tougher outcome despite no filed aggravators — a potential appellate flashpoint.
- Victims’ rights law is broad onhow a victim can be heard, but AI raises a new question — who gets to put words in the mouth of the dead, and with what safeguards.
By Samuel Lopez — USA Herald
Phoenix, AZ (August 23, 2025) — On May 1, more than twenty people filed into a Maricopa County courtroom for the sentencing of Gabriel Paul Horcasitas, 54, convicted of manslaughter in the 2021 road-rage killing of U.S. Army veteran Christopher Pelkey, 37. As family photos played on a screen, ten speakers gave traditional victim impact statements. Then Pelkey’s sister, Stacey Wales, did something no one in that room had seen before: she pressed play on a nearly four-minute AI-generated video that used Pelkey’s photo and voice profile to deliver words she had written — explicitly introduced as a digital recreation.
The room went quiet. A few people cried. Defense attorney Jason Lamm later admitted his first reaction was, “Is this really happening?” He didn’t object in the moment. He does now believe it lengthened his client’s sentence.
Judge Todd Lang imposed 10½ years for manslaughter — within Arizona’s seven-to-twenty-one-year range — plus a concurrent term for a related endangerment count. Lamm’s frustration isn’t about the existence of victim impact statements; it’s about how this one functioned. Arizona prosecutors hadn’t filed aggravating factors. Under Arizona law, victim comments can be considered, but not as aggravators without proper notice. If the court effectively let the avatar’s sentiments substitute for aggravation, that’s the kernel of the defense’s appellate theory.
“As much as we like to think decisions are purely rational, a lot of sentencing is emotional,” a public defender told me. That’s not cynicism; it’s cognitive science colliding with criminal procedure.
What the law actually says — and doesn’t
Victims have a right to be heard. Arizona’s Constitution (Victims’ Bill of Rights), A.R.S. §13-4442 (impact statements in presentence reports), and the federal Crime Victims’ Rights Act, 18 U.S.C. §3771, all recognize it. None of those provisions micromanage the format. Written, spoken, audio, video — Arizona practice already embraces all of it. On paper, an AI-assisted video is just another container.
But containers carry contents, and contents carry evidentiary risk. Traditional victim allocution can describe harm and humanity. An AI avatar adds performance — facial expressions, intonation, and the persuasive aura of “the victim speaking.” When the words speculate about forgiveness, friendship, or what sentence the deceased might want, we move from memory into mind-reading.
Public defenders’ core objection isn’t to grieving families; it’s to attribution. If the avatar says “I forgive you,” the court can’t test whether the real person would have said that post-homicide. Trauma changes people. That’s not an abstraction; appellate courts routinely caution against punishment decisions fueled by unfair prejudice rather than admissible aggravation.
Wales, to her credit, tried to thread the needle — she avoided having the avatar explicitly forgive or request a number. Still, the format amplifies inference. Even neutral phrasing, when delivered by a lifelike face, can feel like a directive.
Inside the room — how persuasion landed
By multiple accounts, Judge Lang watched intently. The gallery felt it. Wales’ teenage son told her he “needed to hear from Uncle Chris one last time.” None of that is improper; victim healing is a legitimate purpose of allocution. But judges also must police their own minds. That’s the paradox of modern sentencing: the system invites emotion into the room then asks the decision-maker to firewall it from the legal calculus.
As a legal analyst who’s sat through more sentencing hearings than I can count, I’ll tell you straight — everyone thinks they’re immune to persuasive tech. No one is. That’s why procedure exists.
“Give me disclosure, and I can give you due process,” a retired federal judge told me years ago. It still applies, especially here.
The due-process rub the defense is pushing
Arizona requires notice to use statutory aggravators. In this case, the state did not file aggravation. If the court weighed the avatar’s sentiments as functional aggravation — even subconsciously — the remedy could be resentencing. The state will counter that the term was within the presumptive range and supported by mitigators and allocution; the defense will argue the record shows mitigating factors were found but neutralized by improper emotional weight placed on the AI video. Appellate courts don’t often reverse within-range sentences, but novel formats can force a closer look at the line between being heard and being prejudiced.
Where this leaves the Arizona case
Within hours of sentencing, the defense noticed an appeal. Even if the panel finds error, it could call it harmless. But if a remand happens, the opinion will likely read like a policy memo for trial courts nationwide — disclosure, authentication, and a clean record on what the judge did and didn’t rely on. Expect more families to try AI-assisted statements. Don’t expect a flood. Expect new house rules.
“As a former inside-the-system legal analyst, I’m not anti-technology — I’m pro-procedure. The real question isn't whether more families will create AI versions of their deceased loved ones—it's whether our courts will develop coherent standards for evaluating this evidence before the practice becomes routine.” — Samuel Lopez | USA Herald Legal Correspondent
[post_title] => AI Video At Sentencing Pushes The Limits of Victim Impact Statements [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => ai-video-at-sentencing-pushes-the-limits-of-victim-impact-statements [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-08-23 23:46:35 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-08-24 04:46:35 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://usaherald.com/?p=76902 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [4] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 76898 [post_author] => 1139 [post_date] => 2025-08-23 22:27:43 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-08-24 03:27:43 [post_content] =>On the docket today
- Last-second peace: The case resolved in open court just before jurors were to be selected, ending a years-long duel over authorship and ownership of early recordings.
- Two suits, one question: Terry Williams sought joint-author status; Missy Elliott countered with a mirror action seeking a declaration that the recordings are hers alone.
- A practical lesson: Bifurcation bids are no silver bullet; the judge kept both tracks together, pushing the parties toward the reality check of a jury trial.
USA HERALD (August 23, 2025) -- Sometimes the smartest legal move happens in the hallway outside the courtroom, not inside it.
That's exactly what unfolded Friday morning in Philadelphia federal court, where rap icon Missy Elliott and producer Terry Williams settled their bitter copyright dispute literally minutes before a jury would have been seated to decide who owns decades-old recordings that sparked dueling lawsuits.
U.S. District Judge Nitza Quinones Alejandro delivered the news to a pool of potential jurors who had already gathered for what promised to be a fascinating clash over music industry authorship. "The attorneys and Mr. Williams have talked and they have resolved the case," Judge Alejandro announced after multiple hushed sidebar conferences that stretched the morning's proceedings.
The settlement terms remain sealed—both sides immediately clamped down when approached for comment—but the timing tells us everything about litigation strategy. Nobody settles this close to trial unless the alternative looks far worse.
Here's what was at stake: Williams claimed he co-authored songs Elliott recorded at his home studio over 30 years ago, alleging those compositions were later "rearranged and featured" on SISTA's 1994 album "4 All the Sistas Around da World." SISTA was Elliott's group before she became the Grammy-winning solo artist we know today.
Elliott's legal team painted a completely different picture in their pretrial memorandum: "Williams did not write a single lyric or in any manner contribute to any of the songs featured on the studio SISTA album... Elliott did not even know of or meet Williams until after the production on the 'SISTA' album was completed and the album was publicly released in 1994."
That's a scorched-earth denial, the kind that usually means someone's heading to trial.
But here's where this case gets interesting from a damages perspective: Elliott's lawyers argued Williams could only prove $27 in streaming revenue from 2012 to present. Twenty-seven dollars. Williams, representing himself, had originally demanded $113,622 in compensatory damages plus over $1 million in punitive damages.
The math didn't add up, and Elliott's team knew it.
Earlier in the litigation, Elliott tried to get Judge Alejandro to bifurcate the cases—handle Elliott's declaratory judgment action first, then tackle Williams' claims. Smart strategy: if Elliott won ownership outright, Williams' suit would collapse. But Judge Alejandro saw through that maneuver and denied the request, rejecting Elliott's assertion that the underlying facts weren't disputed.
That denial likely pushed both sides toward settlement. When a federal judge tells you the facts are genuinely in dispute, it means you're heading to trial with real uncertainty.
Williams represented himself throughout—never ideal when facing sophisticated entertainment lawyers like Michael A. Trauben and Thomas K. Richards from Singh Singh & Trauben LLP. Pro se litigants can win, but they rarely survive the procedural maze of federal copyright litigation unscathed.
The settlement eliminates what could have been a messy public airing of 30-year-old studio sessions, authorship disputes, and the kind of he-said-she-said testimony that makes juries uncomfortable. For Elliott, it removes a potential distraction during what remains a successful career. For Williams, it likely means some compensation without the risk of walking away empty-handed after years of litigation.
Both cases—Williams v. Elliott (2:18-cv-05418) and Elliott v. Williams (2:21-cv-02290)—are now closed in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, ending a legal saga that began in 2018 but traced back to the early 1990s hip-hop scene.
Sometimes the best trial strategy is avoiding trial altogether.
[post_title] => Missy Elliott and Producer Settle Minutes Before Jury Picks in Long-Running Copyright Fight [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => missy-elliott-and-producer-settle-minutes-before-jury-picks-in-long-running-copyright-fight [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-08-23 22:27:43 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-08-24 03:27:43 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://usaherald.com/?p=76898 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) ) [post_count] => 5 [current_post] => -1 [before_loop] => 1 [in_the_loop] => [post] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 76912 [post_author] => 1139 [post_date] => 2025-08-24 11:19:44 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-08-24 16:19:44 [post_content] =>By SAMUEL LOPEZ | USA HERALD — August 24, 2025
Chicago — The Home Depot is staring down a new class action that says the retailer quietly turned its self-checkout cameras into biometric capture devices, logging shoppers’ facial geometry without the written notices and consent Illinois law requires.
Filed Friday, Aug. 1, the complaint by Illinois shopper Benjamin Jankowski alleges the hardware chain deployed “computer vision”—a form of artificial intelligence—to mitigate theft by analyzing faces. In one image attached to the filing, a rectangular box appears around Jankowski’s head on a self-checkout screen, which his lawyers say is evidence that scans of facial geometry were “collected, captured, used, and/or stored” during his visit. The lawsuit asserts that no written notice, policy, or consent was provided before the scan occurred.
“Because Home Depot utilizes facial recognition technology, BIPA requires that it: (1) make publicly available written policies containing retention schedules or guidelines for permanently destroying these facial-geometry scans and (2) obtain its customers’ informed, written consent before collecting and disclosing the facial scans. Home Depot does neither,” the complaint alleges.
Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) is one of the strictest privacy laws in the country. In plain English, if a business in Illinois wants to capture biometrics—like a scan of facial geometry—it must do a few things before it happens:
- Tell you, in writing, what they’re collecting and why.
- Say how long they’ll keep it and when they’ll destroy it.
- Get your written consent first.
BIPA also creates a private right of action—meaning everyday people can sue. Statutory damages can reach $1,000 per negligent violation and $5,000 per reckless or intentional one, plus attorneys’ fees. Multiply that across thousands of shoppers and the numbers escalate quickly. For retailers, the combination of self-checkout cameras and AI-assisted analysis is a legal tripwire if notice and consent are not airtight.
Expect a fight over what the cameras were actually doing. A bounding box on a screen suggests face detection(software noticing “a face-shaped thing” to center an image), which retailers may argue does not equal a “scan of facial geometry” under BIPA. Plaintiffs will counter that the system measured and stored unique facial data points to identify or track individuals—squarely within BIPA’s scope.
That hairline distinction—detection vs. recognition vs. analysis—often decides whether a case survives the first round of motions.
What happens next
Procedurally, here’s the likely path:
- Initial response:Home Depot may move to dismiss, arguing (for example) that the tech didn’t create biometric identifiers, that any vendor—not the retailer—controlled data, or that signage and store policies satisfied BIPA.
- Discovery:Emails, vendor contracts, kiosk specs, configuration files, retention settings, and internal policies become crucial. Who stored the data? For how long? Was it ever shared?
- Class certification:The court will decide whether common questions for all Illinois shoppers predominate over individual issues, a make-or-break moment in BIPA litigation.
- Merits or settlement pressure:If the case survives, statutory damages math and litigation costs can drive negotiations.
As a legal analyst, these are the elicitation-style specifics I’d push for—answers here usually separate allegation from liability:
- Exact functionality:Was the system configured for facial recognition (identity) or face analytics (patterns), and were templates stored?
- Data trail:What logs, hashes, or templates exist per shopper? Where are they stored, and for how long?
- Written artifacts:Where is the public retention/destruction policy and the written consent workflow? If consent was embedded in signage, what did it say and where was it posted?
- Vendor role:Which third-party platforms were involved? Who trained the models, who controlled retention, and what did the service contracts promise about deletion and sharing?
- Scope & timeframe:Which Illinois stores, which kiosks, and since when? Precision here affects class size and exposure.
For Illinois shoppers:
If you used self-checkout at a Home Depot in Illinois, BIPA gives you concrete rights. In practice, that means:
- You should be able tofind a posted policy explaining retention and destruction of any biometric data.
- You must beasked for written consent before any scan of facial geometry is collected.
- If scans were taken without those steps, BIPA lets individualsseek statutory damages in court.
This lawsuit claims none of those requirements were met. Home Depot, for its part, will likely contend that the technology didn’t capture biometric identifiers at all—or that appropriate disclosures existed. Those competing narratives are exactly what Illinois courts scrutinize under BIPA.
For now, millions of Illinois shoppers may want to think twice before assuming that self-checkout selfie is just between them and their phone.
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