Sanction teardown · CA Maryland, USA · 2026-07-20
Khan v. Howard County BAP
What happened
In CA Maryland, 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:
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Fabricated (Case Law)Court found the cited case does not exist at the principal citation; the correct case is MVA v. Deering, 438 Md. 611 (2014).
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Fabricated (Case Law)Court found the cited case does not exist; correct case at that citation is Johnson v. Mayor & City Council of Balt., 387 Md. 1 (2005).
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Fabricated (Case Law)Court found the cited case name does not exist at the cited citation; actual case is Marshall v. Holmes, 141 U.S. 589 (1891).
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Fabricated (Case Law)Court determined the citation does not exist and the principal citation corresponds to a different case.
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False Quotes (Case Law)Court held the cited opinion does not contain the language the appellant purports to quote; citation does not support the asserted proposition.
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Misrepresented (Case Law)Court found the authority cited does not stand for the proposition asserted by appellant.
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False Quotes (Case Law)Court noted the cited case does not contain the language appellant purports to quote.
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
Briefs partly struck
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/2677/LUBNA_KHAN_v_HOWARD_COUNTY_BOARD_OF_APPEALS_ET_AL_USA_20_July_2026.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).