Sanction teardown · Intermediate Court of Appeals of Hawaii, USA · 2026-08-31
State of Hawaii v. Cody Presti
What happened
In Intermediate Court of Appeals of Hawaii, 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)Opening Brief cited 'Stroud V people (Colo.)'; court's search returned zero appellate opinions from Colorado under that name.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Opening Brief cited 'State v. Pune, 94 Hawaii 200 (2000)'; court found no such published opinion and Westlaw returned zero results for 'State v. Pune.'
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Fabricated (Case Law)Opening Brief cited 'State V. Ah Mook Sang' which Westlaw returned no results; court found no appellate opinion by that name.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Opening Brief cited 'State v. Eichman, 74 Wash. App. 479, 874 P.2d 646 (1994)'; court found the citation pointed to unrelated or different opinions and no matching authority supporting appellant's proposition.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Opening Brief cited 'State v. Washington, 125 Or. App. 406, 865 P.2d 474 (1993)'; court found the citation led to an unrelated case (State v. Nilsen) and the proposition cited contradicted Oregon precedent.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Opening Brief cited 'People v. Babich, 192 Cal. App. 4th 1423 (2011)'; court found the citation corresponded to a different reported sequence (192 Cal. App. 4th 1409) and the referenced proposition did not match.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Opening Brief cited 'State V. Alves, 45. Haw.296' but the reporter/volume corresponds to State v. Pokini, not an Alves opinion; court determined the relied-upon authority did not exist as cited.
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
Arguments supported by nonexistent authority were deemed waived; court declined to impose sanctions in this criminal direct appeal though noted sanctions were available under appellate rules.
Additional detail
The appellant's opening brief cited 95 authorities, of which the court could reliably identify only 41; eleven cited cases could not be located or were demonstrably incorrect/misattributed. The court found multiple citations were to nonexistent opinions or to reporter/volume numbers that corresponded to unrelated cases, treated arguments relying on those authorities as waived, and declined to apply civil Rule 11 sanctions on direct criminal appeal while noting HRAP Rules 30 and 51 could authorize sanctions in other circumstances. The court emphasized that fabricated citations undermine judicial integrity and waste resources.
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/2997/State_v._Presti_USA_31_August_2026.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).