Amicus Brief: Melanie H.
Erie County Department of Social Services v. Melanie H
Filing Date
November 15, 2025
Charge
Family Court Case
Jurisdiction
Court of Appeals of the State of New York
Partners
Summary
CIFS filed this amicus brief in the Court of Appeals of New York in M.H’s case to ask the court to reverse the lower courts’ determinations, dismiss the Family Court petitions against M.H., and grant other relief as deemed just and proper. We encourage the court to consider the pitfalls inherent in proceedings involving unauthenticated forensic evidence created by incentivized informants.
PRELIMINARY STATEMENT
In recent years, our country has been flooded with repugnant, phony videos. As the attorney for the child Gabriel has stated, we live in an age of “deep fakes.” (Brief for Gabriel H., p. 4) It is now “possible to create a genuine-looking video that makes real people appear to do and say things they never did or said.” Faking an electronic image is remarkably easy. High school students regularly make fake images of their classmates as a form of cyberbullying. Indeed, “Boys in several states have used widely available ‘nudification’ apps to pervert real, identifiable photos of their clothed female classmates, shown attending events like school proms, into graphic, convincing-looking images of the girls with exposed A.I.-generated breasts and genitalia.” The fake images have caused extreme harm and humiliation to the girls who are portrayed, falsely, in those images.