A Jacksonville deputy who mishandled a child sex crime sting arrest that resulted in catastrophic consequences for an innocent man has avoided inclusion on the Brady List, a roster of cops deemed of dubious credibility when it comes to testifying in court.

The lead officer on the case, Ashley Corbett, arrested and interrogated the Jacksonville father of two young children on charges of solicitation of a child online and unlawful use of a two-way communication device, even though he never committed those crimes.  

Corbett did not act dishonestly. 

But a major mistake led to the wrongful arrest: She relied on artificial intelligence to jump to a conclusion instead of fully investigating the crime. 

“Generally, law enforcement officers are placed on the Brady List for an impeachable offense (dishonesty, an arrest), not for mistakes,” David Chapman wrote in a statement. Chapman is the spokesperson for the Fourth District State Attorney’s Office, which maintains the list. 

Still, it was a major screw-up. A recent Florida Trib investigation revealed that at the root of the botched arrest was an overreliance on facial recognition tools, powered by artificial intelligence technology. 

Corbett, reached by phone and asked about the case, told a Trib reporter, “I’m not speaking to anyone about that.” She then ended the call. The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, which produced a video celebrating the undercover operation, did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

A father separated from his young children

Corbett’s wrongful arrest of an innocent man named Nick was a “life-ruining” ordeal for him and his family, they told The Trib during an interview at their home last month. 

The Trib is withholding Nick’s full name to avoid further disparagement and scrutiny from future employers. He was humiliatingly cuffed in front of coworkers and customers at the grocery store where he was an assistant manager. 

In an interrogation room, he denied doing what he was accused of: soliciting a minor for sex over a computer. 

Nonetheless, Nick spent a night in jail before being bailed out by his wife. He had to wear an ankle monitor for months and was ordered by the court to move out of his home and sever all contact with his two young children. He says he sustained tens of thousands of dollars in legal costs and lost wages. 

It took two and a half months before the charges were dropped and another year before the courts expunged his arrest record. 

Public records show that Corbett, who arrested Nick, has transitioned into a pre-retirement program that allows her to collect her salary and retirement benefits simultaneously for a prescribed length of time. But she remains on the job – and off the Brady List, which is used to inform all those involved in the litigation process of an officer’s history of credibility issues. 

Here is how things went wrong for Nick:

The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, in collaboration with other agencies, initiated a 2025 investigation called Operation Rescue Our Children. Working from a command center, officers logged onto computers and pretended to be children.

They engaged in provocative, often explicit, online conversations, including with a then-35-year-old man named Richard Steven Cook, who used a dating app called Skout to communicate with someone who he thought was a 13-year-old girl. 

He was actually messaging an undercover officer.

As the online exchange continued, Cook sent the undercover cop photographs, which he said were of himself but were actually of Nick, who was a former friend. Cook later told officers he used the photos of Nick because Nick was better looking. Confronted with the images, Nick said they easily could have been taken from his Facebook page.

A statewide facial recognition database

Law enforcement agencies across Florida rely on a facial recognition database called FACESNXT, maintained by the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Department, that contains millions of snapshots from driver’s licenses and other sources.

The database uses AI to analyze the characteristics and patterns of human faces and produce a mathematical value to represent them – which can then be compared against other photos to produce a similarity score.

Assuming that the exchanged photos depicted the offender on the other side of the screen, police showed up at Nick’s workplace and arrested him. Although they did not go into specifics, Nick said officers told him they used facial recognition to match the photos to him.

A bit of basic investigative work would have shown that the Skout account had a profile photo – belonging to Cook. A little more digging would have shown that Cook had been jailed in the past for soliciting minors for sex online. 

Nick had no such background.

It took police five months to get around to arresting Cook, who confessed to the crime and was sent to prison.

The facial recognition database, accessible to departments throughout Florida, including the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, is intended to be a tool to assist in an investigation, not the sole basis for an arrest.

“If you came to me with a facial recognition hit and that was your probable cause, I would probably kick you out of my office because that’s not how it works,” Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters told Action News Jax. 

Waters said that after a previous false arrest using the same technology.

Yet, there is no evidence in the arrest records that Corbett carried out key steps in the investigative process such as securing subpoenas to verify the identity, IP address, and the device used by the suspect before arresting Nick.

Court records show those steps were taken later to confirm Cook was the offender. 

“To do this with facial recognition and not track down any of the digital footprints behind the account is really strange to me,” Matt Kachergus said, a local criminal defense attorney familiar with online sting operations cases.

Overreliance on technology

Experts told The Trib that inadequate investigatory skills or inappropriate use of facial recognition technology should, in some cases, be considered for placement on the Brady List under the guise of violating work standards or policies.

Rachel Moran, a Brady List expert and law professor at St. Thomas University, said overreliance on technology is one thing, but outright sloppiness is another. 

“It was pretty easy to figure out who was actually using this photo. That just makes it all the more egregious,” she said. 

David Chapman, the spokesperson for the state attorney’s office, still wrote in a statement that “facial recognition is a quickly developing technology, and we continue to evaluate best practices for this.” 

Moran said a rapidly advancing technological world is even more of a reason to require law enforcement agencies to reconsider criteria for the Brady List, as well as agency policies and training to prevent false arrests based on artificial intelligence in the future.

“The lists need to be more expansive than a lot of prosecutors make them…Credibility problems arise in a lot of different ways, and one of them that could be a growing area is misuse of technology to create problematic investigations. And if someone has a history of doing that, that would be important information for a defense attorney to know,” she said.

Trinity Webster-Bass covers education for The Florida Trib. You can reach her at trinity.webster-bass@floridatrib.org.