New Mexico’s Supreme Court has fined defense lawyer Stephen Aarons $5,000 and held him in contempt after he filed an appeal brief that included made-up police testimony and witnesses generated by ChatGPT.
The court said the filing 'contained false testimony from wholly fabricated witnesses' and said Aarons failed to verify the accuracy of the brief. It also said he had 'demonstrated a lack of remorse and a lack of concern for his client.'
Aarons told Reuters that he used ChatGPT to summarize the trial proceedings when he agreed to take up the client’s appeal last year. He said he did not understand how much the system could 'hallucinate' facts and called the mistake honest.
'It is a lesson learned for all professionals who rely upon this powerful but sometimes unstable technology,' Aarons said in a statement to Reuters.
The court said it will refer Aarons to an attorney disciplinary board for investigation. In a hearing on August 21, Aarons told the court that he fed a computer-generated transcript and other case materials to ChatGPT, expecting it to produce 'a bulletproof summary.'
Justice C. Shannon Bacon was not impressed. At the hearing, she asked: '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 added that 'the problem with lawyers relying on AI hallucinations is an above-the-fold story every single day.'
The appeal is still pending and was assigned on September 2 to Kim Chavez Cook, a New Mexico public defender, who declined to comment. The district attorney’s office for Dona Ana County also declined to comment.
This is not some edge-case glitch. It is what happens when a high-stakes profession treats a chatbot like a research assistant with perfect recall. The result is not efficiency; it is risk pushed onto the court, the client, and the public.
The legal system is supposed to run on verified facts, not synthetic filler. If lawyers want the speed of AI, they also have to own the cost of checking every claim before it lands in a filing.
