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Pleasant v. Burns

Court
N.D. Alabama
Jurisdiction
USA
Decided
2026-04-08
AI tool
Implied
Outcome
Order to Show Cause
Monetary penalty
None reported

What was hallucinated

Fabricated: Case Law | Plaintiff cited at least one case that does not exist; the court identified the citation as fabricated and required explanation but Plaintiff did not address it. || Misrepresented: Case Law | Plaintiff repeatedly misstated the holdings of existing cases (unsupported statements of authority); court listed these misrepresentations in the show-cause order. || False Quotes: Case Law | Plaintiff quoted language attributed to cases that the court found do not exist (fabricated quotations); court ordered Plaintiff to explain the origin of the quoted language.

Sanction teardown · N.D. Alabama, USA · 2026-04-08

Pleasant v. Burns

What happened

In N.D. Alabama, 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)
    Plaintiff cited at least one case that does not exist; the court identified the citation as fabricated and required explanation but Plaintiff did not address it.
  • Misrepresented (Case Law)
    Plaintiff repeatedly misstated the holdings of existing cases (unsupported statements of authority); court listed these misrepresentations in the show-cause order.
  • False Quotes (Case Law)
    Plaintiff quoted language attributed to cases that the court found do not exist (fabricated quotations); court ordered Plaintiff to explain the origin of the quoted language.

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.

Check a brief before you file it → · See our live false-verify rate

Source: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/documents/1946/Pleasant_v._Burns_USA_8_April_2026.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).

Source: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/documents/1946/Pleasant_v._Burns_USA_8_April_2026.pdf

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