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USA v. Sethi

Court
E.D. Texas
Jurisdiction
USA
Decided
2025-08-28
AI tool
Implied
Outcome
Court denied defendant's motions; sentencing ordered to proceed as scheduled; no professional sanctions imposed.
Monetary penalty
None reported

What was hallucinated

False Quotes: Case Law | Defendant attributed to Faretta a quotation that does not appear in the opinion; court found the quoted language was fabricated/misquoted and corrected the record. || False Quotes: Case Law | Defendant purported a quotation from Chambers that the court says does not exist and is inapposite to the record; court rejected the misquote. || Fabricated: Case Law | Court found that 18 of the defendant's purported quotations from various cases were complete fabrications and that some cited cases do not exist; none supported his claims. || Fabricated: Exhibits & Submissions | Defendant asserted the investigator's report contained a "verification from the Senior General Counsel of Hess Corporation," but the court found no such verification among the report's exhibits.

Sanction teardown · E.D. Texas, USA · 2025-08-28

USA v. Sethi

What happened

In E.D. Texas, 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)
    Defendant attributed to Faretta a quotation that does not appear in the opinion; court found the quoted language was fabricated/misquoted and corrected the record.
  • False Quotes (Case Law)
    Defendant purported a quotation from Chambers that the court says does not exist and is inapposite to the record; court rejected the misquote.
  • Fabricated (Case Law)
    Court found that 18 of the defendant's purported quotations from various cases were complete fabrications and that some cited cases do not exist; none supported his claims.
  • Fabricated (Exhibits & Submissions)
    Defendant asserted the investigator's report contained a "verification from the Senior General Counsel of Hess Corporation," but the court found no such verification among the report's exhibits.

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

Court denied defendant's motions; sentencing ordered to proceed as scheduled; no professional sanctions imposed.

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/752/UNITED_STATES_OF_AMERICA_v_SAMEER_PRAVEEN_SETHI_USA_28_August_2025.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).

Source: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/documents/752/UNITED_STATES_OF_AMERICA_v_SAMEER_PRAVEEN_SETHI_USA_28_August_2025.pdf

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