Sanction teardown · S.D. Iowa, USA · 2026-04-30
Burnside v. Verdick, et al.
What happened
In S.D. Iowa, 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)Plaintiffs cited 'Jones v. County of Los Angeles, 802 Fed. App’x 282 (9th Cir. 2020)'; court found no such case and Westlaw returned In re Wing Cheung Wong, 802 F. App'x 280, 282 (9th Cir. 2020).
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Fabricated (Case Law)Plaintiffs cited 'Thompson v. Hong, 2020 IL App (2d) 190551'; court found the citation corresponds to Fay v. Fifty K Corporation, No. 2-19-0551, 2020 WL 2095845 (Ill. App. Ct. Apr. 29, 2020) (alt. 2020 IL App (2d) 190551-U).
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Fabricated (Case Law)Plaintiffs cited 'Wallace v. County of Los Angeles, 479 F. Supp. 3d 1088 (C.D. Cal. 2020)'; court located Curtis v. Oliver, 479 F. Supp. 3d 1039, 1088 (D.N.M. 2020) instead, indicating mismatch/nonexistent title.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Plaintiffs cited 'Estate of Smith v. Shulz, 2018 WL 2192187 (N.D. Iowa)'; court found the citation number corresponds to Cabrera v. N.Y. Fresh Meat Inc., 2018 WL 2192187 (S.D.N.Y. May 14, 2018), not a N.D. Iowa decision.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Plaintiffs cited 'Yates v. Mansfield, 2014 WL 11535036 (S.D. Iowa)'; court search returned a U.S. FDA safety report (Feb. 19, 2014) rather than any S.D. Iowa case, indicating a non-existent case citation.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Plaintiffs cited 'Doe v. United States, 463 F. Supp. 2d 934 (N.D. Iowa 2006)'; court found Lampe v. Genuine Parts Co., 463 F. Supp. 2d 928, 934 (E.D. Wis. 2006) instead, indicating the cited caption/court was incorrect or fabricated.
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
Order to Show Cause
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/2061/Burnside_v._Verdick_USA_30_April_2026.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).