A $50 crack buy conducted by undercover detectives on Jacksonville’s Northside has emerged as the foremost case in the country dealing with how police use facial recognition technology, according to leading researchers on the subject.

The Georgetown Center on Privacy and Technology has been closely tracking the case of Willie Lynch since November, when the Times-Union first reported on his identification by police using facial recognition software. Depositions made public earlier this month in Lynch’s pending appeal offer new details on how the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office used the technology and reveal that its crime analyst didn’t understand the algorithms driving the software’s match-making process.

Nationally, privacy advocates say law enforcement’s use of facial recognition technology is Orwellian and potentially unconstitutional. Their research led to a Congressional hearing in March. There, Democrats and Republicans alike recoiled at law enforcement’s use of the software, which scans Americans with no criminal histories via driver’s license and ID photo databases. The lawmakers raised concerns about the technology’s accuracy, invasion of privacy and the potential for abuse of an unregulated system.

Far from the uproar on Capitol Hill lies the Lynch case, borne out of a small-time, spontaneous Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office drug buy. Clare Garvie, a researcher at the Georgetown center, has used court records from the case to educate public defenders on how the technology could apply to criminal cases.

"So far it’s the case that has dealt most directly and most broadly with facial recognition," Garvie said. "This is the first time that we actually have a case where the court is considering what to do with it."

Aside from the legal questions, the trial offers a poignant example of how the war on drugs is carried out in Jacksonville. Lynch, a lifelong addict who has been in and out of prison much of his adult life, proved his intelligence in the courtroom. Despite having only a high school education, he represented himself in court, at times crafting handwritten motions that zeroed in on the unusual way detectives identified him as a suspect.

Lynch wanted to introduce evidence of the software used to identify him, but he was overridden by Circuit Judge Mark Borello. Lynch was later convicted, but during his sentencing, Judge Borello stopped well short of the 30 years sought by prosecutors.

Jacksonville criminal courts often ensnare addicts, said Judge Borello, a former prosecutor, "and that’s always bothered me."

"Before, I couldn’t really do anything about it," Judge Borello said during a June sentencing hearing. "Well, I’m in a job now where maybe I can do something about it."

The judge nonetheless sentenced Lynch to eight years.

MEETING ‘MIDNIGHT’

On Sept. 12, 2015, two undercover narcotics detectives were pulling out of an apartment complex near 23rd and North Laura Street, where they had just carried out a drug deal.

As they made their way out of the cul-de-sac in an unmarked car, one of the detectives was still filling out paperwork when a man randomly flagged them down.

"You good?" he asked them, according to the detectives.

Caught off guard, but rolling with it, one of the detectives said he was looking for $50 worth of "hard," or crack cocaine. The man on the street, who the detectives would later identify as Lynch, went inside a nearby two-story apartment and returned moments later. They exchanged the money for the drugs.

"I tell him to zip his zipper up," one of the detectives said in a deposition. "He said, ‘I appreciate it.’ He said, ‘You see me around, my name is Midnight.’"

The entire transaction lasted no more than five minutes.

But as "Midnight" re-emerged from the apartment and approached the car with the drugs, one of the detectives was holding a smartphone up as if he were taking a call while discreetly snapping photos, according to depositions. A couple of weeks later, when police wanted to make an arrest, they had only the nickname Midnight, the address where the drug deal took place, and the smartphone pictures as leads. It was less than they usually work with.

In their depositions, the detectives said they didn’t have time to activate their typical surveillance equipment, given the unexpected nature of the deal. They chose still not to activate the equipment when Midnight went inside the apartment, they said, out of fear they might be spotted by onlookers and identified as cops.

On Sept. 28, the detectives couldn’t figure out who exactly they had purchased the crack from.

One of them sent photographs of the suspect to the Sheriff’s Office Crime Analysis Unit, along with the alias. Celbrica Tenah, an analyst with the unit, sent back Lynch as a potential match within hours, but he was not arrested until December.

MYSTERYWARE

As Lynch’s case headed toward a trial, his appointed public defender deposed the detectives and the analyst who worked to identify him. Surprisingly, no one could speak in detail to how facial recognition technology works.

Tenah, who runs the queries in the software, said that certain results get a "star" if it’s a more likely match for a face, but she had a hard time elaborating.

"It does arrange the photos based on likeliness," Tenah said in her deposition. "I can’t speak to the algorithms … but it does from my understanding arrange the photos based on what’s most likely to the photo that you uploaded."

The public defender then asked Tenah how many stars a match could potentially receive. Just one? Two?

"I want to say — I don’t know that definitively so I don’t want to speak to that," Tenah answered.

The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office in November could not identify any policies guiding its use of the software and declined to discuss the technology in detail.

Researchers at the Georgetown center found that facial recognition technology is less accurate than fingerprinting. Beyond that, they said, the use of the software is virtually unmonitored in Florida. No audits are run of the more than 8,000 searches in the system each month to make sure police are not abusing the power of the database, according to the researchers. An FBI co-authored report suggests that the technology could also be less accurate on black people, like Lynch.

"Despite these findings, there is no independent testing regime for racially biased error rates," Georgetown researchers wrote in their Perpetual Lineup report. "In interviews, two major face recognition companies admitted that they did not run these tests internally, either."

At trial, neither the prosecution nor the defense introduced any evidence about how facial recognition was used in its case. Its accuracy was not called into question.

Right before trial, the prosecutor said he didn’t plan on having the Sheriff’s Office crime analyst testify because he was unsure if the testimony would be allowed.

In order to have the analyst testify, Assistant State Attorney Brett Mereness said the court would have to hold a hearing to determine the scientific validity of how the expert, Tenah, used the software.

A REMARKABLE MOTION

One of the more noteworthy twists in the case came the morning of trial, when Lynch filed a motion that he had written by hand from behind bars, asking the judge to suppress evidence and testimony relating to how he was identified by detectives, along with the relevant photographs.

"The photographs and other pretrial identification of the defendant were obtained through procedures which were so unnecessarily suggestive and conducive to irreparable mistaken identification as to constitute a denial of due process of law," the motion said.

In the court filing, Lynch appears to conflate the Sheriff’s Office’s mugshot program, called JPICS, with the facial recognition database. It’s not hard to imagine why he may have made the mistake.

On Lynch’s arrest and booking report, JPICS is cited as the way detectives identified their suspect, obscuring the office’s reliance on the facial recognition technology.

Nonetheless, Lynch called the system into question, contending that the "accuracy and reliability of the facial recognition computer program (J-PICS) used to identify the defendant has not been determined."

Garvie said it was no wonder Lynch didn’t grasp the difference between the mugshot system and the facial recognition database.

"The technology isn’t clearly and cogently presented in court," she said.

In a separate motion, Lynch made a bid to call Tenah, the analyst, as a potential witness. The detectives relied on her identification of Lynch despite the fact that she was not an eyewitness to the drug deal, Lynch argued, calling the process "unduly suggestive."

But just minutes into the trial, the judge terminated Lynch’s right to represent himself because the defendant had continued to interrupt court proceedings.

Lynch’s appointed public defender, meanwhile, disagreed on calling Tenah as a witness. So did the judge. Both of them predicted that Tenah’s testimony was more likely to hurt the defendant than help him.

Garvie, the facial recognition researcher, disagrees. She said Lynch was on the right track.

"He’s trying to describe something that’s very complicated," Garvie said."I think what we’re seeing is a highly intelligent, highly motivated individual who just had a really rough break of it by getting addicted at 17."

‘HE’S A BACKSLIDER’

Lynch’s church pastor and his family painted a sympathetic picture of him during sentencing.

Bertha Turner, Lynch’s sister, testified that her brother had been struggling for many years with mental health and addiction issues.

"I don’t think that the system is for him," Turner said. "I think he needs mental help … He hasn’t been competent since he was 17 years old. He’s been going through what he’s going through now."

Lynch’s mother had been caring for him, Turner said, but she had recently passed away.

"She was trying to help my brother and I didn’t know it had come to this," she said. "I thought he was okay."

Lynch’s public defender lobbied for the judge to release Lynch on probation with additional supervision from Pastor Peter McIntosh’s Jesus Christ Deliverance Center.

Unlike typical probation, the center would help Lynch get on his feet again with employment, housing and other support services, his lawyer argued. Prison, she said, would not help her client at all. Nor would it solve the underlying issue that kept landing him in court.

McIntosh, the pastor, told the judge he works with people like Lynch "all the time." Beneath all the chaos of the courtroom, the pastor said, there was a part of Lynch that was being overlooked.

"He was once in church," McIntosh said. "He’s a backslider. And God is married to the backslider."

McIntosh added, "I’m hoping the court will be merciful on his behalf."

HABITUAL OFFENDER

Contrary to the defense’s picture of a "backsliding" addict, the prosecution used Lynch’s history of drug-related arrests to argue for more time in prison.

Assistant State Attorney Mereness was resolute in asking the judge to sentence Lynch to 30 more years behind bars.

"I will acknowledge, you know, his family spoke very eloquently about him," Mereness said at sentencing. "It does appear that they care for him. And the pastor, I wish he could have gotten to him sooner." Mereness then laid out Lynch’s criminal history in exhausting detail, going through every offense, sentence, and subsequent re-arrest. Since 1988, Mererness said, Lynch had been convicted of five felonies and 39 misdemeanors.

The prosecutor concluded: "I do believe if he is released he will continue to repeat the offenses that he’s done for the last three decades."

When it came time for the judge to make a decision, however, he rebuffed the prosecutor’s argument.

In particular, Judge Borello differed with the prosecutor on whether Lynch was genuinely tired of his life addicted to drugs, revolving in and out of prison.

"I have no doubt in my mind, after having dealt with you for several months, that had you not had this issue you would have had a different life," Judge Borello said. "You are an intelligent man."

PENDING APPEAL

A state public defender has been preparing Lynch’s appeal since February, and court records indicate that he could be setting the stage to once again raise legal questions on the Sheriff’s Office’s use of facial recognition.

Challenges to the use of the technology likely could focus on due process issues, similar to the thread Lynch was pulling on in his handwritten motions, Garvie said.

"The argument he would want to make is that [the analyst] was instrumental in making the identification, which means that she was acting as a witness against him and he has a right to confront her in court," Garvie said.

Another argument, which Garvie said could be more of a stretch, is that Lynch has the right to view the source code underlying the software that was used to identify him. The Sixth Amendment of the Constitution gives defendants the right to a robust defense, which could include the opportunity to analyze the program’s code and develop a claim around its accuracy.

There are other potential arguments to be made around the legality of identification process, such as the fact that Lynch’s picture was never placed in a photo-array after the analyst identified his him as a suspect. The photo array, which mixes suspects with random "filler" mugshots, is a check against suggestive identifications. Lynch had wanted to argue that Tenah’s role in the identification was too suggestive.

Over the course of the last six months, Garvie said, she has been both fascinated and saddened by the Lynch case.

"This is literally a $50 drug bust of somebody who’s been addicted since he was 17. He’s indigent. The reason why he’s selling drugs is to buy drugs," Garvie said. "It’s a bleak look at policing."

Ben Conarck: (904) 359-4103