Compiled by Citation Safe (Digital Empire Holdings LLC) from the court’s published sanction order (decided September 22, 2026). Quotes and case details come from the order itself — check the primary source before relying on them.

Sanction teardown · SC Idaho, USA · 2026-09-22

Posey v. Bushnell

What happened

In SC Idaho, USA, a filing relied on an unnamed/unconfirmed AI tool to help draft legal argument. The court identified the following problems with the citations in that filing:

Fabricated (Case Law)

Bushnell cited Dairyland Insurance Co. v. Hawkins. The court found no relevant Idaho case with that name and no reporter citation was provided.
False Quotes (Doctrinal Work)

The court found that many of Bushnell’s twenty-two purported quotations from caselaw, statutes, court rules, pattern jury instructions, and the Idaho Constitution were fabricated or inaccurate; only six were accurate apart from minor spelling errors.
Misrepresented (Exhibits & Submissions)

Bushnell misrepresented the record by asserting that the district court failed to adopt her requested Idaho Civil Jury Instruction 9.20 punitive-damages instruction. The court found that the district court had adopted the requested instruction.
Misrepresented (Exhibits & Submissions)

Bushnell falsely asserted that the district court failed to adopt her truth-as-a-complete-defense instruction, media-defendant instruction, and actual-malice instruction. The court found that the first two instructions had been adopted and that Bushnell had never requested an actual-malice instruction.
Misrepresented (Exhibits & Submissions)

Bushnell asserted that the district court applied the law inconsistently because one judge had determined that she was not a media defendant. The court found that no judge had made that determination.
Fabricated (Case Law)

Bushnell cited Jones v. Lynn, 155 Idaho 439, 445 (2013), as authority concerning reversal for voir dire errors without a contemporaneous objection. The court found that no such decision existed; the only Idaho Jones v. Lynn decision was a 2021 summary-judgment case that did not discuss jury selection.
Fabricated (Case Law)

Bushnell cited McAdam v. McAdam as authority that legally inaccurate jury instructions require reversal. The court could not identify the cited case and found that the closest authority, McAdams v. McAdams, concerned child custody and did not address juries or jury instructions.
Misrepresented (Exhibits & Submissions)

Bushnell asserted that the verdict form improperly asked the jury to award damages before determining liability. The court found that the district court never provided such a verdict form.

Which AI tool

an unnamed/unconfirmed AI tool. Note: Charlotin's public database records tool attribution only where a court order, brief, or reporting on the matter states it explicitly; "unidentified" or "implied" means the record indicates AI use but does not name a specific product — we do not guess.

Outcome

Appeal affirmed

How Citation Safe would have caught this

Citation Safe runs three deterministic layers before a brief is filed: (1) does the citation exist against CourtListener's database of published opinions, (2) if quoted, does that exact language appear in the source, (3) does the cited case actually support the proposition it is cited for. Fabricated case citations fail Layer 1. Fabricated or misattributed quotations fail Layer 2 even when the underlying case is real. Misrepresented holdings — a real case cited for a proposition it does not support — are the target of Layer 3. None of these checks involve asking another language model whether the citation looks right; they are lookups and text-matches against the actual source, which is why a hallucinated citation has to survive a direct lookup against the authoritative source — not another model's opinion — to earn a VERIFIED stamp; our measured false-verify rate is published live at /quality.

Check a brief before you file it → · See our live false-verify rate

Source: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/documents/3123/Posey_v._Bushnell_USA_22_September_2026.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).