Sanction joins growing roster of lawyer-discipline cases over AI filings
The New Mexico Supreme Court on Wednesday fined Stephen Aarons $5,000 and held him in contempt, concluding that his appeal brief in a murder case contained “false testimony from wholly fabricated witnesses” generated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The panel also found that Aarons had “demonstrated a lack of remorse and a lack of concern for his client.”
Aarons, a private attorney based in Santa Fe, was handling the appeal of Oscar Renee Sandoval, who pleaded not guilty to the murder of the mother of his children before being convicted and sentenced last year to life in prison. The court said it will refer Aarons to an attorney disciplinary board for investigation.
Last month, the New Mexico Supreme Court ordered Aarons to explain how the fabricated material — which it said appeared to include “fictional statements that the shooter was wearing dark pants and a white shirt” — was included in his primary brief in the appeal.
At a 21 August hearing, Aarons told the court he had fed a computer-generated transcript and other case materials to ChatGPT, presuming it would generate “a bulletproof summary.” Justice Shannon Bacon challenged that explanation. “Counsel, do you watch the news? Do you listen to the radio? Do you read anything about what’s going on in the world?” Bacon asked at the hearing. “Because the problem with lawyers relying on AI hallucinations is an ‘above-the-fold’ story every single day.”
In a statement, Aarons said he had used ChatGPT to summarize the trial proceedings when he agreed last year to take up the defendant’s appeal, and did not understand the degree to which AI could “hallucinate” facts. “I am remorseful but hopeful that the disciplinary board takes into account it was an honest mistake,” he said. “It is a lesson learned for all professionals who rely upon this powerful but sometimes unstable technology.”
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The appeal remains pending. The court assigned it on 2 September to Kim Chavez Cook, a New Mexico public defender. Cook declined to comment. The local district attorney’s office also declined to comment.
The sanction is the latest in a growing number of cases in which state and federal judges have disciplined lawyers for filing court documents generated by AI tools without adequately vetting them. Dozens of lawyers have been sanctioned for filing briefs in which AI produced fabricated case citations or misquoted the law. Aarons’s filing appears to have gone further, containing fabricated witness testimony in a criminal appeal.