A St. Paul, Minnesota, man who drove a car into a group of Minneapolis protesters in June 2021, killing one person, was sentenced on Wednesday to 20 years in prison.

In October, Nicholas Kraus pleaded guilty to second-degree assault and second-degree murder for killing Deona Marie Knajdek during the incident.

Kraus faced a third charge of second-degree assault, which prosecutors dropped as part of the plea deal.

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Kraus was charged for an incident in which he accelerated toward a parked car that was used as a barricade on the street where demonstrators protested the law enforcement killing of Winston Boogie Smith, Jr.

He then struck the parked car, pushing it into the protesters, killing Knajdek and injuring three others.

Fox station KMSP in Minneapolis reported that Kraus admitted in court in October that he drove into the barricades and crowd on purpose.

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Under questioning, he also admitted to suffering from a mental health issue and being under the influence of narcotics at the time of the crash. What he could not say, though, was what drove him to do it and why.

Before sentencing on Wednesday, Kraus told the court it "should have been me" who died that day, while expressing support for the Black Lives Matter movement.

Kraus told the courts he made a bad choice that day and that he deserved the maximum sentence of 21 years in prison.

Although he said he did not expect the family to forgive him, Kraus apologized to the family.

A victim in the incident told the courts he disagreed with the plea deal and wanted Kraus to be served the maximum sentence.

Ultimately, the court sentenced Kraus to 45 months, or 3.75 years, in prison for second-degree assault and 240 months, or 20 years, for second-degree murder. Both sentences will run concurrently, meaning the most he will serve is 20 years.

Facial recognition technology is mostly associated with uses such as surveillance and the authentication of human faces, but scientists believe they've found a new use for it — saving seals.

A research team at Colgate University has developed SealNet, a database of seal faces created by taking pictures of dozens of harbor seals in Maine's Casco Bay. The team found the tool's accuracy in identifying the marine mammals is close to 100%, which is no small accomplishment in an ecosystem home to thousands of seals.

The researchers are working on expanding their database to make it available to other scientists, said Krista Ingram, a biology professor at Colgate and a team member. Broadening the database to include rare species such as the Mediterranean monk seal and Hawaiian monk seal could help inform conservation efforts to save those species, she said.

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Cataloguing seal faces and using machine learning to identify them can also help scientists get a better idea of where in the ocean seals are located, Ingram said.

"Understanding their dispersal, understanding their patterns really helps inform any conservation efforts for the coast," she said. "For mobile marine mammals that move around a lot and are hard to photograph in the water, we need to be able to identify individuals."

SealNet is designed to automatically detect the face in a picture, crop it and recognize it based on facial patterns such as eyes and nose shape, as it would a human. A similar tool called PrimNet that is for use on primates had been used on seals previously, but SealNet outperformed it, the Colgate researchers said.

The Colgate team published its findings in April in the scientific journal Ecology and Evolution. They processed more than 1,700 images of more than 400 individual seals, the paper said.

The paper stated that the "ease and wealth of image data that can be processed using SealNet software contributes a vital tool for ecological and behavioral studies of marine mammals in the developing field of conservation technology."

Harbor seals are a conservation success story in the U.S. The animals were once subject to bounties in New England, where they were widely viewed by fishermen as pests in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which turned 50 in October, extended them new protections — and populations began to rebound.

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Seals and other marine mammals have long been studied using satellite trackers. Using artificial intelligence to study them is a way to bring conservation into the 21st century, said Jason Holmberg, executive director of Wild Me, an Oregon-based company that works to bring machine learning to biologists. Wild Me is developing a potential partnership with SealNet.

"This is a shift and a lift of ‘big brother’ style technology to a very benevolent conservation-style goal," Holmberg said.

Harbor seals are now fairly abundant in New England waters, where they haul out on rocks and delight seal watch cruises and beachgoers. Other seal species, however, remain in jeopardy. The Mediterranean monk seal is thought to be the world's most endangered seal with only a few hundred animals remaining.

The use of facial recognition could provide more valuable data, said Michelle Berger, an associate scientist at the Shaw Institute in Maine, who was not involved in the SealNet research.

"Once the system is perfected I can picture lots of interesting ecological applications for it," Berger said. "If they could recognize seals, and recognize them from year to year, that would give us lots of information about movement, how much they move from site to site."

The Colgate researchers are also working with FruitPunch, a Dutch artificial intelligence company, to improve some aspects of SealNet to encourage wider use. FruitPunch is getting a few dozen scientists around the world to work on a challenge to streamline SealNet's workflow, said Tjomme Dooper, FruitPunch's head of partnerships and growth.

Improved automation of the facial recognition technology could make SealNet more useful to more scientists, Dooper said. That would open new opportunities to study the animals and help protect them, he said.

"What this does is help the biologists study the behavior of seals, and also population dynamics," Dooper said. "Harbor seals are an important indicator species for the ecosystem around them."