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McCarthy v. U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration

Court
3rd Cir. CA
Jurisdiction
USA
Decided
2026-03-27
AI tool
Unidentified
Outcome
Reprimand; Notification to other courts and the National Disciplinary Data Bank
Monetary penalty
None reported

What was hallucinated

Fabricated: Case Law | One cited DEA adjudication in the Opening Brief was entirely fabricated (did not exist); discovered when the Court ordered copies of the cited authorities. || Misrepresented: Case Law | Seven DEA-adjudication summaries were riddled with factual and legal inaccuracies and misrepresented the adjudications (e.g., portrayed lesser sanctions than actually imposed); the summaries were AI-generated and not verified by counsel.

Sanction teardown · 3rd Cir. CA, USA · 2026-03-27

McCarthy v. U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration

What happened

In 3rd Cir. CA, 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)
    One cited DEA adjudication in the Opening Brief was entirely fabricated (did not exist); discovered when the Court ordered copies of the cited authorities.
  • Misrepresented (Case Law)
    Seven DEA-adjudication summaries were riddled with factual and legal inaccuracies and misrepresented the adjudications (e.g., portrayed lesser sanctions than actually imposed); the summaries were AI-generated and not verified by counsel.

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

Reprimand; Notification to other courts and the National Disciplinary Data Bank

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/1858/McCarthy_v._DEA_USA_27_March_2026.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).

Source: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/documents/1858/McCarthy_v._DEA_USA_27_March_2026.pdf

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