The New Mexico Supreme Court fined defense attorney Stephen Aarons USD 5,000 and held him in contempt after he filed an appeal containing fabricated witness testimony generated by ChatGPT.
The court handed down its ruling on Wednesday, and the fine was directed toward the state's client protection fund.
Aarons was representing Oscar Renee Sandoval, who was convicted of murdering the mother of his children and sentenced to life in prison last year. The Santa Fe-based lawyer, who practised law for more than 40 years, was also removed from the case entirely, and the appeal is ordered to restart from scratch.
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Aarons told Reuters he used ChatGPT to summarize trial proceedings when he took up the appeal, expecting what he called a ‘bulletproof summary’ of the case.
Instead, the tool generated invented witness names and fabricated police testimony, including a fictional description of the shooter wearing dark pants and a white shirt.
The court noted that the filing contained false testimony from wholly fabricated witnesses. Aarons admitted he did not fully understand how AI tools could produce false information that looks real, calling his own mistake ‘stupidity’ during a hearing on August 21.
Justice C. Shannon Bacon did not hold back while questioning the lawyer. "Counsel, do you watch the news? Do you listen to the radio? Do you read anything about what's going on in the world?" she asked, pointing out that stories about lawyers being caught out by AI hallucinations appear almost daily.
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The court also said that Aarons showed ‘a lack of remorse and a lack of concern for his client,’ and it referred him to the state's attorney disciplinary board for further investigation. His client's appeal remains pending and is reassigned to a public defender.
This case adds to a growing list of instances where lawyers in the US have faced sanctions for submitting AI-generated content without checking it first, a trend that pushed legal bodies to consider mandatory training on the risks of using such tools in court filings.