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Wayne K. Smith, Sr. v. Polk County, et al.

Court
W.D. North Carolina
Jurisdiction
USA
Decided
2026-06-03
AI tool
Implied
Outcome
Order to Show Cause
Monetary penalty
None reported

What was hallucinated

False Quotes: Case Law | Plaintiff's opening brief attributes a quotation to Board of County Commissioners v. Brown that does not appear verbatim in that decision; Court labels it a fabricated quotation and counsel acknowledges the inaccuracy. || False Quotes: Case Law | Plaintiff's opening brief attributes a quotation to Laber v. Harvey that is a misquotation; counsel acknowledges the misquotation though contends the underlying principle is correct.

Sanction teardown · W.D. North Carolina, USA · 2026-06-03

Wayne K. Smith, Sr. v. Polk County, et al.

What happened

In W.D. North Carolina, 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:

  • False Quotes (Case Law)
    Plaintiff's opening brief attributes a quotation to Board of County Commissioners v. Brown that does not appear verbatim in that decision; Court labels it a fabricated quotation and counsel acknowledges the inaccuracy.
  • False Quotes (Case Law)
    Plaintiff's opening brief attributes a quotation to Laber v. Harvey that is a misquotation; counsel acknowledges the misquotation though contends the underlying principle is correct.

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/2271/Smith_v_Polk_County_et_al__ncwdc_USA_3_June_2026.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).

Source: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/documents/2271/Smith_v_Polk_County_et_al__ncwdc_USA_3_June_2026.pdf

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