Fair warning. If you’re looking forward to reading Michael Connelly’s latest, “Resurrection Walk,” done read further. You can return and read my rant later, after you’ve finished the book.

If you’re read it already, or don’t plan on reading it but just want to see what I’m ticked off about, then feel free to continue.

I wrote the initial draft of this post while reading Connelly’s “Resurrection Walk.”

I’ll say this up front. Connelly is one of my favorite authors. He’s a former crime reporter, and can usually be counted on to provide interesting account of the investigative process, whether his character is a reporter, lawyer, or a detective. Connelly’s books, at their best, are excellent descriptions about how an investigation proceeds, often starting with the most rudimentary information, then slowing building momentum while moving forward from one bit of new evidence to another, cross-checking and evaluating along the way while the story slowly emerges, often with errors or roadblocks along the way requiring back tracking.

This latest book is the combination of an investigation by his longtime character, Harry Bosch, now a retired police detective, and a courtroom drama led by attorney Mickie Haller, who was introduced many books ago in this series as Bosch’s half-brother.

I was part way through the book and enjoying it, until it got to a pivotal courtroom scene that just didn’t make sense to me.

The premise of the scene–that key evidence Haller presented in court through a highly qualified expert witness, was thrown out because it utilized software with “AI” in its name. And, in the book, since AI was not yet a legally accepted tool that is broadly accepted in courtrooms, the evidence of his key witness was excluded.

In the book, Haller is arguing in court that evidence shows his client is not guilty of shooting and killing her husband, although she pleaded “no contest” several years earlier and is currently serving her sentence for the crime.

During this hearing, Haller calls a consultant to testify about her forensic recreation of the crime scene, in which the victim was shot in front of his house just seconds after he walked out his front door.

In the book, the consultant displays a recreation of the shooting using a computer program she has developed that crunches all the numbers, angles, distances, and timing drawn from the autopsy report, crime scene photos, and witness statements. It then returns the most likely scenario of how the crime happened, and in this case, where the shots were fired from.

Here’s where it goes silly, in my view.

After the consultant was accepted as an expert witness, the prosecutor objected to her recreation of the crime, arguing that the software utilized “machine learning” and was therefore based on artificial intelligence, a science that had not yet been determined to be generally admissible in court.

And, as a result, the judge ordered the recreation and the consultant’s testimony stricken, leaving Haller sputtering and bemoaning the loss of his star witness.

The problem with this is that well before fancy software was available, experts like Haller’s witness were analyzing and recreating crime scenes by manually calculating the angles and timing from exactly the same kinds of data supposedly used to feed the software of Haller’s consultant. And his consultant had already said she had been a courtroom consultant for at least 16 years, dating back before AI was a thing.

So it seems to me that it would have been straightforward, if not simple, for Haller, the hotshot defense lawyer, to simply step back and have his expert witness explain the recreation without resort to the machine learning algorithms and the fancy graphics. It comes down to basic math and physics in either case, and a witness with this consultants expertise and background should have been able to explain her analysis step-by-step without the software assist.

Anybody hooked on Forensic Files or other crime shows on cable have certainly seen many examples of similar analyses being done using charts, graphs, crime scene photos, and forensic report to recreate a crime. And since Haller’s witness had already been accepted as an expert witness, her conclusions, with or without the fancy simulation graphics, should have continued to carry substantial weight.

The judge’s ruling throwing out the recreation was a dramatic turning point in the book, but was so jarring, and so apparently unnecessary, that it has thrown off my appreciation of the book as a whole. I did finish the book, but that whole portion continues nagging at me and undermining the pleasure of the unfolding story.

Yes, AI is a “thing” right now, and getting it into the story was probably intended to demonstrate cutting edge evidentiary issues that are still being debated. But in this case, there was old fashioned science and technology available as a backstop, but this was ignored.

There. I’ve vented.

And after writing the first draft of this post, I did go back and finish the book.