Sanction teardown · TSJ Gran Canaria (Spain), Spain · 2026-02-10

Caso No. 0000140/2025-00

What happened

In TSJ Gran Canaria (Spain), Spain, 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 (Legal Norm)
  Referencia a una supuesta "Guía de buenas prácticas en la intervención con menores víctimas, 2018" atribuida al CGPJ: no existe constancia de tal guía ni de los datos de publicación alegados.
• False Quotes (Case Law)
  Cita atribuida y textual a la STS 494/2020 que no contiene las palabras atribuidas en el recurso; la sentencia existe pero no incluye el pasaje citado.
• False Quotes (Case Law)
  Cita atribuida a la STS 104/2019 que no existe en el texto de la sentencia (la STS 104/2019 trata del 'caso Caronte' y no de la credibilidad de la víctima).
• Misrepresented (Case Law)
  Numerosas sentencias citadas con número/fecha que no coinciden o que, aunque existen, versan sobre temas distintos al alegado (ej.: STS 282/2019, STS 387/2022, STS 845/2016 entre otras).
• Fabricated (Case Law)
  Cita inexistente o numeración que no corresponde a una sentencia con el contenido alegado (p. ej. STS 798/2022 citada con doctrina sobre destrucción de pruebas, cita inexistente en la base de datos).
• Fabricated (Other)
  Resumen del hallazgo del informe documental: 48 de 52 citas generadas por herramienta de IA y ninguna de las notas textuales reproducidas aparece en las sentencias invocadas.

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

Monetary Sanction; Bar Referral (monetary penalty: 420 EUR.)

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/1538/1771188875411.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).