Sanction teardown · N.D. Alabama, USA · 2026-08-12
Garry Chapman v. City of Priceville, et al.
What happened
In N.D. Alabama, 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)Attributed a quoted formulation not found in the opinion.
-
False Quotes (Case Law)Attributed a quoted formulation not found in the opinion.
-
False Quotes (Case Law)Attributed a quoted formulation about independent decisionmakers not contained in the cited opinion.
-
False Quotes (Case Law)Attributed a quoted formulation about 'similarly situated' language not present as quoted.
-
False Quotes (Case Law)Attributed a quoted characterization of appellate review of agency proceedings not found in the cited opinion.
-
False Quotes (Case Law)Attributed a quoted admonition regarding judges with an interest not appearing as quoted in the cited case.
-
False Quotes (Case Law)Attributed a quoted requirement that an official municipal policy be the 'moving force' to the cited Supreme Court decision in a way the court found unsupported.
-
Misrepresented (Case Law)Cited Mt. Healthy for the proposition that allegations of direct evidence of motive suffice at the pleading stage; court found the citation did not support the claimed proposition as presented.
-
Misrepresented (Legal Norm)Asserted a scope of municipal contract immunity and cited an Alabama statute in a manner the court deemed a misrepresentation of that authority (combined with a fabricated case).
-
Fabricated (Case Law)Cited a non-existent Alabama case as authority.
-
Fabricated (Case Law)Cited a non-existent Alabama case as authority.
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
Public reprimand; Order to Notice
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/2836/Chapman_v._City_of_Priceville_USA_12_August_2026.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).