The New Mexico Supreme Court has held attorney Stephen Aarons in contempt and fined him for submitting a legal brief that contained fabricated police testimony and witnesses generated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The court said the filing, prepared for the appeal of his client Oscar Renee Sandoval, who was convicted of murder, included “false testimony from wholly fabricated witnesses.”

During an August 21 hearing, Aarons told the court he had used ChatGPT to summarise trial proceedings and did not understand the extent to which AI could “hallucinate” facts. “I am remorseful but hopeful that the disciplinary board takes into account it was an honest mistake,” he told Reuters. “It is a lesson learned for all professionals who rely upon this powerful but sometimes unstable technology.”

The justices fined Aarons $5,000 and referred him to an attorney disciplinary board. Justice C. Shannon Bacon expressed incredulity at the hearing: “Counsel, do you watch the news? Do you listen to the radio? Do you read anything about what’s going on in the world? Because the problem with lawyers relying on AI hallucinations is an above-the-fold story every single day.”

The sanction is the latest in a growing number of cases where state and federal judges have disciplined lawyers for submitting AI-generated court documents without adequate vetting. Dozens of lawyers have been sanctioned for filing briefs with made-up case citations or misquoted law. Aarons’s filing appears to have gone further, containing fabricated witness testimony in a criminal appeal.

Aarons, a private attorney based in Santa Fe, was handling the appeal of Oscar Renee Sandoval, who pleaded not guilty to the murder of the mother of his children before being convicted and sentenced last year to life in prison. The appeal is still pending and was assigned on September 2 to Kim Chavez Cook, a New Mexico public defender. Cook declined to comment. The district attorney’s office for Dona Ana County also declined to comment.

Source: www.aljazeera.com