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AI in Court

Claiming Video Was "Deepfake" Not Enough to Require Excluding It, Even Absent Evidence of Who Recorded It

"Apart from trying to cash in on the so-called 'liar's dividend,' Amyda's counsel had little to work with."

Eugene Volokh | 10.13.2026 1:46 PM

From State v. Amyda, decided Friday by the Iowa Supreme Court, in a unanimous opinion by Justice Edward Mansfield:

In this sexual abuse case, we are asked to decide whether the district court erred in admitting a video. The video graphically shows the defendant abusing the victim. However, there was no chain-of-custody evidence connecting the video to the defendant. The victim was asleep at the time and could not personally attest to the abuse shown in the video. And the defendant claimed "deepfake."

On our review, we conclude that the district court did not abuse its discretion in admitting the video. The video came to the victim's attention about a month after the defendant had been in the victim's bedroom. The video appears to be taken by the perpetrator of the abuse at close range using a cellphone. It shows the victim sleeping, but she testified in detail that she recognized her bedroom, her bed and furnishings, the clothing she had been wearing, her legs and genitalia, and the defendant's tattooed hand—all as they had been that evening.

Collectively, these circumstances were enough to admit the video. And the defendant's mere speculation that the video was a deepfake was not enough to bar its admission….

The court concluded that the video had been adequately authenticated:

To authenticate the video, the State had to "produce evidence sufficient to support a finding that the item is what the proponent claims it is." Iowa R. Evid. 5.901(a). According to Iowa Rule of Evidence 5.901, one example of sufficient evidence is "[d]istinctive characteristics and the like." That is, evidence such as a video may be authenticated by its "appearance, contents, substance, internal patterns, or other distinctive characteristics of the item, taken together with all the circumstances."

We applied this circumstantial-evidence principle in State v. Holderness (Iowa 1980). Holderness, which predated the adoption of the Iowa Rules of Evidence, was a burglary case involving the admissibility of a photograph. There the victim awoke to find that his garage doors were open and some of his property was missing. One of the missing items was a briefcase that contained, among other things, an Instamatic camera. Two hours later a boy in the neighborhood brought by a roll of Instamatic film that he had found. The film was developed. It turned out to have eight photographs the victim had taken recently in the course of his work and two additional photographs. One of those two photographs showed the defendant on his knees in the victim's backyard, near the garage, holding the briefcase partially open.

We held in Holderness that the........

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