Sanction teardown · N.D. New York, USA · 2026-03-04
Jeri'yah Ford v. Troy City School District, et al.
What happened
In N.D. New York, 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)Plaintiff's Response cited unspecified Eighth Circuit and D. Kan. cases that opposing counsel and the Court could not locate; court concluded these were fabricated and ordered show cause.
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Misrepresented (Case Law)Plaintiff mischaracterized Whitfield v. Notre Dame Middle Sch.; Court found the citation distinguishable and not supportive of Plaintiff's Title VI theory.
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/1615/Ford_v._Troy_USA_4_March_2026.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).