State of Washington v. Puloka

What happened

Joshua Puloka was charged with shooting 5 people outside a bar in Des Moines, Washington, on September 26, 2021. Three of them died. He asserted self-defense. Part of the event was captured in a bystander's smartphone video of about 10 seconds, which was short, blurry and affected by motion.

The defense retained a man with a background in creative video production, and no prior experience in criminal cases, to improve the clip. He processed it with Topaz Labs AI software and Adobe editing tools. According to the Greenberg Traurig summary of the record, the process added roughly 16 times the number of pixels in the original, using a method that could not be described in detail. The defense sought to show the enhanced version to the jury.

The prosecution opposed it through Grant Fredericks, a forensic video analyst. NBC News reported that his filing described the output as a video in which every pixel was new and which carried an "illusion of clarity" for a lay viewer.

What the court did

The court treated AI enhancement of video in a criminal case as a novel technique and held a hearing under the Frye standard (general acceptance in the relevant scientific community), together with Washington Evidence Rules 702 and 403. Reporting on the order states that the court identified the relevant community as forensic video analysts rather than commercial video producers, and found the tool had not been peer reviewed or shown to be reproducible by that community.

The court excluded the enhanced clip. NBC News quoted the order as finding that admitting it "would lead to a confusion of the issues and a muddling of eyewitness testimony, and could lead to a time-consuming trial." The original, unenhanced footage remained available to both sides.

Where it stands

The case went to trial on the original footage. In May 2024 a jury convicted Mr. Puloka on 8 counts, including first-degree murder, and on June 21, 2024 he was sentenced to life without parole. The order excluding the enhanced clip is unpublished. This record could not locate a public copy of it, and the account above rests on press and practitioner reporting.

The obligation it engaged

The enhanced clip was offered as a clearer view of what the camera recorded. What it contained was the output of a system that generated new picture information by prediction. That engages Checkability before adoption: output may be used only if it can be checked, and here the frames added by the model could not be traced back to anything in the source file. It also engages Reproducible analysis, because the process could not be rerun and verified by the forensic video community.

The governing test is direct on these facts. A competent forensic video examiner, working from the original file without the AI system, could not reproduce the enhanced frames. The court's choice of the forensic community as the reference group, rather than commercial editors, is the same question the Standard asks about any tool: whether a peer in the discipline can check the result.

Sources

• NBC News · April 2, 2024
  Washington state judge blocks use of AI-enhanced video as evidence in possible first-of-its-kind ruling
• Greenberg Traurig · May 23, 2024
  Washington Court Rejects Novel Use of AI-Enhanced Video in Trial
• Criminal Legal News · December 15, 2025
  When AI Invents the Pixels: Challenging AI-Enhanced Video Evidence in Criminal Cases
• FOX 13 Seattle · June 21, 2024
  Man sentenced to life in prison for Des Moines triple murder

What could not be confirmed

The judge's surname appears as both McCullough and McCullogh in reporting. The order itself was not located; its reasoning is taken from secondary accounts. The NBC News publication date is approximate. Whether any appeal challenged the exclusion was not confirmed.