Sanction teardown · CA Maryland, USA · 2026-05-20
Brandy Dorsey v. Walter Livramento, III
What happened
In CA Maryland, 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:
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Fabricated (Case Law)Appellant cited an inexistent opinion; court struck the related argument.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Appellant cited a non-existent case, which the court identified and struck from the brief; court noted reporter citations corresponded to different cases.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Appellant relied on a cited case that does not exist; court struck the portion of the brief relying on it.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Appellant cited a non-existent appellate decision as authority; court struck the assertion based on that citation.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Appellant cited a non-existent case; court noted the citation irregularity and struck the portion relying on it.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Appellant cited a case that does not exist under the given citation; court struck the portion relying on it.
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Misrepresented (Case Law)Appellant cited a real case but for a proposition the case does not support; the court explained the cited decision addressed a different subject.
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
Warning
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.
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Source: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/documents/2173/Dorsey_v._Livramento_USA_20_May_2026.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).