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Zack Jones v. Target Corporation

Court
D. Oregon
Jurisdiction
USA
Decided
2026-03-06
AI tool
Implied
Outcome
Recommended granting terminating sanctions and dismissal of the case
Monetary penalty
None reported

What was hallucinated

Fabricated: Case Law | Court observed that the pro se plaintiff 'relied on "hallucinated" case citations' in his filings; the opinion does not identify or analyze any specific fabricated citation.

Details

Recommendations are here, and were later adopted.

Sanction teardown · D. Oregon, USA · 2026-03-06

Zack Jones v. Target Corporation

What happened

In D. Oregon, 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)
    Court observed that the pro se plaintiff 'relied on "hallucinated" case citations' in his filings; the opinion does not identify or analyze any specific fabricated citation.

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

Recommended granting terminating sanctions and dismissal of the case

Additional detail

Recommendations are here, and were later adopted.

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: Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).

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