Hallucinated witnesses are the reason a Santa Fe defence lawyer with four decades of practice is now barred from New Mexico’s highest court. On Wednesday 9 September 2026 the New Mexico Supreme Court held Stephen D. Aarons in contempt, fined him $5,000 and referred him to its Disciplinary Board, because the brief he filed in a murder appeal quoted four people who do not exist and three who never said what it claimed.
He had asked ChatGPT for a summary of the trial. Reuters reported the order on 11 September, and The Verge, The Guardian and Al Jazeera followed within hours, which is how a four-page order from a state court became the artificial intelligence story of the week.
We read the order as the outlets that obtained it quoted it, the Santa Fe New Mexican’s account of the 21 August hearing, the trial coverage from Las Cruces that explains what the appeal is about, the Albuquerque Journal’s April survey of New Mexico’s own hallucination cases, and the 2,039-case AI Hallucination Cases Database that Damien Charlotin updated on 12 September. Together they answer questions the wire story does not: who the hallucinated witnesses were, what else the brief got wrong, what the court ordered line by line, and how AI tools used for summarising differ from the ones that produce fake citations.
Three things stood out. The order lists seven separate pieces of false testimony, not one, and only four of them involve invented people. The fine is the same $5,000 that a Manhattan judge imposed in the first well-known ChatGPT sanction in June 2023, 1,175 days earlier. And in the database that tracks these cases, fabricated exhibits and submissions make up 3.7% of hallucinated items, which is what makes hallucinated witnesses rarer, and more dangerous, than the fake case citations most sanctioned lawyers have filed.
Our earlier report on misinformation vulnerabilities across seven chatbots covered why long AI conversations drift. This case shows what drift looks like when it reaches a court file.
Table of contents
- What the Order Says About the Hallucinated Witnesses
- How a Murder Appeal Ended Up With Hallucinated Witnesses
- The Hallucinated Witnesses Timeline, From Mesilla to the Supreme Court
- What the Court Ordered Over the Hallucinated Witnesses, Line by Line
- Two Accounts of the Hallucinated Witnesses: Aarons vs the Justices
- Where the $5,000 Fine for Hallucinated Witnesses Sits Among 2,039 Cases
- Why Hallucinated Witnesses Are Rarer Than Fake Citations
- New Mexico’s Patchwork of AI Rules Before the Hallucinated Witnesses
- What Happens Next After the Hallucinated Witnesses
- Hallucinated Witnesses FAQ
- References and Further Reading
What the Order Says About the Hallucinated Witnesses
The order itself is four pages long and dated 9 September, according to The Epoch Times, which obtained it and quoted its central finding at length. The Verge linked a copy hosted on DocumentCloud. Reuters, whose report by Mike Scarcella is the one most outlets rewrote, quoted two phrases from it and a third from the August order to show cause. Between the three accounts, the list of hallucinated witnesses and other errors is longer than the headline suggests.
Seven items of false testimony, four hallucinated witnesses
The passage The Epoch Times quoted reads, in the court’s words, that Aarons “admitted to the Court that the brief in chief contained false testimony from wholly fabricated witnesses—Officer Michelle Amarillo, Officer Sanchez, Manal Al-Jibury, and Teresa Marquez”, followed by false testimony attributed to three named people who did give evidence, and “misrepresented legal authority” in multiple cases. Laid out one item at a time, the hallucinated witnesses are only part of the damage.
| Item in the order | Person named | Status | What the brief attributed to them |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Officer Michelle Amarillo | Wholly fabricated | Police testimony that was never given |
| 2 | Officer Sanchez | Wholly fabricated | Police testimony that was never given |
| 3 | Manal Al-Jibury | Wholly fabricated | Civilian testimony that was never given |
| 4 | Teresa Marquez | Wholly fabricated | Testimony about the shooter’s clothing and appearance |
| 5 | Danny Stanton | Real witness | That he received threats from the defendant which he took seriously |
| 6 | Linda Stanton | Real witness | Testimony about the threats her husband received |
| 7 | Mariah Chavez | Real witness | Testimony about the shooter’s clothing and appearance |
| 8 | Multiple cited cases | Legal authority | Misrepresented, in the court’s word |
Two of the four hallucinated witnesses were police officers. The Epoch Times put it plainly in its opening line: the brief contained testimony from “supposed police officers who do not exist”. One of them, “Officer Sanchez”, has no first name in the order at all. Three real people, Danny Stanton, Linda Stanton and Mariah Chavez, were given words the record does not contain, which is a different failure from hallucinated witnesses and arguably a worse one, because a reader who checks the witness list finds them there.
The name that borrows the victim’s surname
The third of the hallucinated witnesses is “Manal Al-Jibury”. The woman Sandoval was convicted of killing was Shiereen Al-Jibury, 39, according to the Doña Ana County District Attorney and the Las Cruces Bulletin. The model did not invent a stranger. It produced a plausible relative of the victim, with a first name the record never mentions, and attached testimony to her. None of the coverage we read points this out, and the order as quoted does not comment on it either. It is the detail that best explains why the hallucinated witnesses looked credible to the person who signed the brief.
The clothing detail most outlets skipped
Reuters reported that the court’s August order to show cause said the fabricated material appeared to include “fictional statements that the shooter was wearing dark pants and a white shirt”. NewsCord, which compared 20 outlets’ versions of the story, found that eight of the ten it examined left that detail out. It matters because it shows the hallucinated witnesses came with hallucinated facts about the shooting itself, not only invented names. Items 4 and 7 in the table above are the court’s own record of that.
What Aarons admitted about the hallucinated witnesses, and did not tell his client
The order, as The Epoch Times summarised it, records that Aarons signed the brief without verifying either its factual claims or its legal authority, that he did not tell his client he had failed to verify it, and that he did not tell his client after the court discovered the problem. That is the basis for the sentence Reuters quoted, that he “demonstrated a lack of remorse and a lack of concern for his client”. The Verge’s version compresses the same finding into a single clause about failing to “verify the factual claims and legal authority in his AI-generated brief”.
How a Murder Appeal Ended Up With Hallucinated Witnesses
The wire story describes the client only as a man who “pleaded not guilty to the murder of the mother of his children”. The local record is fuller, and it matters, because the hallucinated witnesses were invented on top of a real trial with real witnesses whose names the model had in front of it.
The case behind the appeal
Shiereen Al-Jibury was shot on 1 April 2024 on University Avenue in Mesilla, the small town beside Las Cruces, near Zia Middle School. According to the charging documents reported by CBS4 Local, Sandoval, then 57, was driving a 2016 Ford Explorer from Las Cruces to Mesilla when he stopped and fired at her chest. She got out of the vehicle and he chased her, firing four more shots that struck her in the back and the leg.
A passing driver stopped, gave aid and called 911, and the District Attorney’s release says Al-Jibury had run into the road waving at that driver to make the call. Sandoval was arrested in Ciudad Juárez on 10 April and handed to US Marshals. A grand jury indicted him on 16 April.
It was the Mesilla Marshal’s Office’s first murder investigation in more than 20 years, CBS4 reported. The couple’s son told marshals that his father had signed over property deeds a few days before the shooting.
A three-day trial and a life sentence
The trial before Judge Douglas R. Driggers was scheduled for five days and took three, from 12 to 15 January 2025, the Las Cruces Bulletin reported. The jury returned its verdict after a few hours of deliberation on the third day: guilty of first-degree murder and of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon toward a witness. The couple’s daughter testified against her father.
On 25 February 2025 Sandoval was sentenced to life in prison plus four and a half years for the aggravated assault with a firearm enhancement, the terms to run consecutively. CBS4 reported that he smiled and danced in the courtroom after the verdict and shouted “Viva Mexico”. The prosecutors were Chief Deputy District Attorneys Melissa GarcÃa and Spencer Wilson.
The “bulletproof summary” that produced the hallucinated witnesses
Aarons was hired by Sandoval’s relatives for the appeal in 2025, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported, and filed the brief that year. At the 21 August hearing he told the justices he had loaded a computer-generated transcript of the trial and other case documents into ChatGPT, assuming it would produce “a bulletproof summary” of the proceedings. In his written response to the court he acknowledged “undue reliance upon generative artificial intelligence” and wrote that he had not realised the model would generate, “apparently out of whole cloth, fictitious witnesses, testimony, quotations and authorities in a form that appeared coherent and plausible”.
That is a summarisation task, not a research task, and the distinction runs through the rest of this article. A system built for natural language processing compresses a long document by predicting what a summary of it would most plausibly say. When the transcript is long and the prompt asks for confidence, plausible names fill the gaps. Aarons told The Epoch Times: “I wrote the brief but the table of contents and the summary contained numerous errors.” The hallucinated witnesses were in the summary he relied on, and from there they moved into the brief he signed.
Who Stephen Aarons is
His own biography page says he has defended people since 1980, began his New Mexico practice in 1985, spent 1985 to 1989 in the New Mexico Public Defender Department, including three years as chief of its death penalty defence division, and prosecuted 51 courts-martial as a US Army Judge Advocate in Germany between 1980 and 1983. He retired from the Army Reserve as a lieutenant colonel and has run his own firm since 1992.
The Santa Fe New Mexican described him as “well-known” locally with 38 active cases pending in state courts, and reported that his reply brief cited the recent death of a grandson and a pending surgery. Nothing in his record suggests a lawyer who needed to be told what a witness is. That is precisely why the justices found his explanation for the hallucinated witnesses so hard to accept.
The Hallucinated Witnesses Timeline, From Mesilla to the Supreme Court
Every date below comes from a named source, and the gaps between them are calendar arithmetic on those dates. The shooting is 891 days before the written order. The hearing that decided the outcome came 19 days before the order was signed, and the wire story that made it news came two days after that.
| Date | Event | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Apr 2024 | Shiereen Al-Jibury shot on University Avenue, Mesilla | DA release; CBS4 |
| 10 Apr 2024 | Sandoval arrested in Ciudad Juárez, handed to US Marshals | CBS4; DA release |
| 16 Apr 2024 | Grand jury indictment for first-degree murder | KVIA |
| 12 to 15 Jan 2025 | Three-day trial; guilty verdict on the third day | Las Cruces Bulletin |
| 25 Feb 2025 | Life plus four and a half years, consecutive | KVIA; CBS4 |
| 2025 | Aarons hired by the family; ChatGPT-assisted brief filed | Santa Fe New Mexican |
| Aug 2026 | Order to show cause cites the “dark pants and a white shirt” passage | Reuters |
| Fri 21 Aug 2026 | Show-cause hearing; sanction announced from the bench | Santa Fe New Mexican |
| 2 Sep 2026 | Appeal assigned to public defender Kim Chavez Cook | Reuters |
| Wed 9 Sep 2026 | Four-page written order: contempt, $5,000, referral | The Epoch Times |
| 11 Sep 2026 | Reuters report; The Verge, Guardian and others follow | Reuters; The Verge |
| 12 Sep 2026 | Hallucination database updated to 2,039 cases | Charlotin database |
The longest gap is the 542 days between the sentence and the hearing, which is the period in which the brief with the hallucinated witnesses was written, filed, read by the court and found wanting.
Where the 30 days lands
The order gives Aarons 30 days to pay. Counted from 9 September, that is 9 October 2026. The Santa Fe New Mexican’s report of the 21 August hearing also said “within 30 days”, so the clock may have started from the bench ruling, which would put the deadline at 20 September. The written order is the document that binds him, and neither Reuters nor The Epoch Times reported a specific date.
What the Court Ordered Over the Hallucinated Witnesses, Line by Line
The headline number is $5,000, but the fine is the least of the six things the court did about the hallucinated witnesses. Between the Santa Fe New Mexican’s report from the hearing, The Epoch Times’ summary of the written order and ColombiaOne’s fuller reading of it, the order does the following.
| What the court did | Detail | Reported by |
|---|---|---|
| Found Aarons in direct contempt | For signing and filing a brief he had not verified | Reuters; ColombiaOne |
| Fined him $5,000 | Payable within 30 days to the State Bar of New Mexico Client Protection Fund | Santa Fe New Mexican; ColombiaOne |
| Barred him from appearing before the court | While the disciplinary process is pending | The Epoch Times; ColombiaOne |
| Referred him to the Disciplinary Board | The board will investigate and undertake proceedings; it declined to comment | Reuters; The Epoch Times |
| Struck all the briefing in the appeal | The appeal starts again from the beginning | Santa Fe New Mexican; The Epoch Times |
| Appointed the Law Office of the Public Defender | Kim Chavez Cook assigned on 2 September | Reuters; ColombiaOne |
The bench ruling came first
The outcome was not a surprise to anyone in the courtroom on 21 August. The Santa Fe New Mexican’s Phaedra Haywood reported that after hearing Aarons the justices took a short recess, and Chief Justice Julie Vargas then told him the matter was being referred to the Disciplinary Board. “We appreciate that you admitted you made a mistake and you were wrong,” she said, before adding that the court was concerned he had not shown much concern for his client.
The contempt finding, the removal from the case and the $5,000 payment were all reported that afternoon. The written order on the hallucinated witnesses followed 19 days later, and the world’s press followed the written order.
Where the money goes
The $5,000 is not paid to the court or to the state. Both the New Mexican and ColombiaOne report that it goes to the State Bar of New Mexico’s Client Protection Fund. That is a pointed choice for a sanction whose stated basis includes a lack of concern for the client, and it separates the hallucinated witnesses order from a fee award to an opposing party, which is the more common form a hallucination sanction takes in civil cases.
What the disciplinary board can do
The New Mexican noted that the referral means Aarons “could face even harsher sanctions in the future up to and including disbarment”. The board, which The Epoch Times contacted, declined to comment. Until it acts, Aarons cannot appear before the Supreme Court, and at the time of the hearing he had 38 active cases in the state’s lower courts, according to the same report.
Two Accounts of the Hallucinated Witnesses: Aarons vs the Justices
The most striking thing in the coverage is that the lawyer and the court describe the hallucinated witnesses in incompatible terms. Aarons calls it an honest mistake and says he is remorseful. The order says he showed a lack of remorse. Both cannot be a complete description, and the hearing transcript, as reported by the New Mexican, shows how the gap opened.
| Question | Aarons’ account | The justices’ account |
|---|---|---|
| Remorse | “I am remorseful but hopeful that the disciplinary board takes into account it was an honest mistake” (to Reuters) | He “demonstrated a lack of remorse and a lack of concern for his client” (the order) |
| How it happened | Assumed ChatGPT would produce a “bulletproof” summary; acknowledged his “stupidity” | “Either you have buried your head in the sand … or you took a gamble” (Justice Bacon) |
| Responsibility | “I’m hoping I don’t present as not accepting responsibility” | He “assumed without checking”; the responsibility rests with the lawyer (Justice Vigil) |
| The client | Relatives knew of a problem; the client was not told of the hearing, citing limited English and incarceration | Concern that he “hadn’t appeared to have much concern for his client” (Chief Justice Vargas) |
| What should change | Mandatory continuing education on AI; he has completed such a course | Cut short: the problem “is an above-the-fold story every single day” |
“Do you watch the news?”
The exchange every outlet quoted came from Justice C. Shannon Bacon, who has sat on the court since February 2019 and was its chief justice from April 2022 to April 2024. “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 asked. “Because the problem with lawyers relying on AI hallucinations is an above-the-fold story every single day.”
The New Mexican carried the sentence that followed, which most wire rewrites cut: “So either you have buried your head in the sand … and that’s an intentional choice to be uninformed, or you took a gamble, and neither of those are consistent with the code of conduct.”
The law-student analogy
Justice Michael E. Vigil offered the frame the court will presumably apply to the next case. There is nothing wrong with using AI in legal writing, he said, just as there is nothing wrong with a law student helping to draft a filing. “But when you put your name on the brief and file it, you are attesting you have checked the brief and it is accurate.” Aarons, he said, “assumed without checking”. Under that reading the hallucinated witnesses are not an AI problem at all. They are a signature problem, and the signature was his.
Two statements, one week apart
Aarons gave Reuters a two-sentence statement of 34 words. The statement he emailed The Epoch Times runs to 101 words and contains the Reuters text verbatim as its last two sentences, with three new ones in front. The additions matter: “I wrote the brief but the table of contents and the summary contained numerous errors”, a claim that he did not know AI could hallucinate facts “not only in my brief but in pleadings submitted by other attorneys”, and “I am glad the court threw out my defective pleading”.
The first of those places the hallucinated witnesses in the summary rather than in his own drafting. The court’s finding is that the distinction does not matter, because he signed the whole document.
Where the $5,000 Fine for Hallucinated Witnesses Sits Among 2,039 Cases
The database Damien Charlotin maintains under a CC BY 4.0 licence recorded 2,039 cases on 12 September 2026, each one a decision in which a court or tribunal addressed hallucinated AI content in more than a passing reference. The United States accounts for 1,396 of them, or 68.4%, followed by Canada with 217, Australia with 110, the United Kingdom with 69 and Israel with 57. The numbers below are the database’s own tallies, and the percentages are our arithmetic on them.
Who files the hallucinations
Self-represented litigants account for 1,173 of the 2,039 cases, or 57.5%. Lawyers account for 811, or 39.8%. Judges appear as the party using AI in 32 cases, expert witnesses in 15 and prosecutors in five. The hallucinated witnesses case sits in the lawyer column, which is the smaller one, but it is the column in which sanctions carry professional consequences beyond the case itself.
The same $5,000 for hallucinated witnesses, 1,175 days apart
Of the 2,019 cases the database counts for outcomes, 368 ended in a monetary sanction, or 18.2%, and 158 in a disciplinary referral, or 7.8%. Aarons drew both for the hallucinated witnesses. Among the 183 cases with a known penalty in US dollars, the most populated band is $1,000 to $5,000, with 86 cases, or 47%. Thirty-five cases fall between $5,000 and $10,000, 26 between $10,000 and $50,000, and six above $50,000.
A $5,000 fine therefore sits at the top of the most common band, which is also exactly where Mata v. Avianca put it in June 2023, when Judge P. Kevin Castel fined the lawyers who filed ChatGPT’s invented airline cases the same $5,000. The two orders are 1,175 days apart.
Six sanctions, one table
The comparison the wire story gestures at, “dozens of lawyers have been sanctioned”, looks like this when the named cases are lined up. Every figure is from the source in the right-hand column.
| Case | Court and date | What was hallucinated | Sanction | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mata v. Avianca | S.D.N.Y., June 2023 | Fake case citations and quotations | $5,000; case dismissed | Wikipedia |
| Unnamed NM attorney | D.N.M., 2025 | Six nonexistent cases in a brief written out of state | $1,500; ethics course; self-report to bar | Albuquerque Journal |
| Lindell defamation case | D. Colo., 7 Jul 2025 | More than two dozen errors including fake cases | $3,000 each, two lawyers | NPR |
| Pro se employment suit | D.N.M., reported Apr 2026 | Hallucinated filings; $355.69 quintillion demand | $8,640 | Albuquerque Journal |
| Beus Gilbert v. BYU | D. Utah, 9 Sep 2026 | Fabricated citations; four tools named | $3,000; two AI-ethics courses | Charlotin database |
| Sandoval appeal (Aarons) | N.M. Supreme Court, 9 Sep 2026 | Four hallucinated witnesses; three misquoted; misrepresented authority | $5,000; contempt; removal; referral | Reuters; The Epoch Times |
How the database records the hallucinated witnesses
The database entry is dated 21 August 2026, the hearing date, and titled “Unspecified murder appeal (Las Cruces area)”, with the Santa Fe New Mexican as its source. It logs the party as Lawyer, the tool as ChatGPT, the nature as one fabricated exhibit or submission plus one false quote in an exhibit or submission, the penalty as 5,000 USD, and the outcome as “Found in contempt; removed from the case; Monetary Sanction; Briefs stricken and appeal to start anew; Bar Referral.” No other entry on the database’s first page carries that combination.
How lawyers react, by the numbers
The database also codes how the person responsible responded. Across the cases it has tagged, attempts to withdraw or correct the filing appear 384 times and apologies 374 times. Blaming a tool appears 94 times, denying 85, setting up new systems in the firm 63, blaming a junior 59, and spontaneously taking a continuing-education course 47.
Doubling down appears 36 times, and blaming the client ten. Aarons’ public statements about the hallucinated witnesses fit three of those codes: an apology, an attribution to “this powerful but sometimes unstable technology”, and a course completed before the hearing. He also proposed mandatory education for everyone else, which is the suggestion Justice Bacon cut short.
Why Hallucinated Witnesses Are Rarer Than Fake Citations
Reuters wrote that Aarons’ filing “appears to have gone further” than the citation cases. The database lets that claim be measured, and it holds.
5,326 fake cases, 226 fake exhibits
The database breaks its 2,039 cases into 6,039 individual hallucinated items. Of those, 5,326, or 88.2%, are case law, the invented precedents that Mata v. Avianca made famous. Legal norms account for 346 and doctrinal works for 59. Exhibits and submissions, the category that covers invented evidence and testimony, account for 226 items, or 3.7%. By the database’s own coding, the hallucinated witnesses belong to that 3.7%. Fabrication outright is the most common nature of error at 3,395 items, ahead of misrepresentation at 1,627 and false quotes at 982, and the brief with the hallucinated witnesses managed all three in one document.
Criminal matters are also a small share of the whole. Of the 1,786 cases tagged with a legal field, 63 are criminal, or 3.5%, against 450 in contract, 255 in administrative law and 201 in civil rights. The database entry for this case is one of very few in which hallucinated witnesses appear in a criminal appeal, which is what Reuters meant.
Why a summary produces hallucinated witnesses where research produces fake cases
A fabricated citation can be checked in a legal database in a minute, which is why opposing counsel and clerks catch them. A fabricated summary of a trial can only be checked against the transcript, which is the document the summary exists to replace. That asymmetry is the whole story here. Aarons loaded a computer-generated transcript into a chatbot and, by his own account, trusted the output because it “appeared coherent and plausible”. The hallucinated witnesses were coherent precisely because they were built from the real names, roles and events in the document, one of them from the victim’s own surname.
Our review of ZenMux’s credits for hallucinations looked at a vendor pricing the same failure as a refundable defect. A court prices it differently.
ChatGPT in the record
The database identifies a tool in 224 cases and leaves 1,815 untagged, with a note that naming a tool does not mean it caused the error. Of the 224, ChatGPT or another OpenAI product is named in 134, or 59.8%, followed by Claude in 18, Google’s Gemini or Bard in 16, Westlaw’s CoCounsel in 16 and Microsoft Copilot in 13. OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment from Reuters, The Guardian or The Epoch Times about the hallucinated witnesses order. Nothing in the coverage suggests the court considered the tool’s terms of use relevant; Justice Vigil’s law-student comparison places the duty entirely on the signature.
Adoption is outrunning the checks
The 8am Legal Industry Report for 2026, summarised in the American Bar Association’s Law Practice magazine, found that 69% of legal professionals personally use generative AI at work, up from 31% in the 2025 edition, a 2.2-fold rise in a year. The most common uses were drafting correspondence at 58%, general research at 58%, brainstorming at 54% and summarising documents at 47%, the last being the exact task that produced the hallucinated witnesses.
In the same survey, 54% said their firm had provided no training on responsible use and had no plans to. An earlier Thomson Reuters survey cited by The Verge in June 2025 found 63% of lawyers had used AI and 12% used it regularly.
New Mexico's Patchwork of AI Rules Before the Hallucinated Witnesses
Aarons told the court in his written response that this was not the first time ChatGPT had surfaced in a New Mexico filing, and he was right. What the state lacks is a single rule. The Santa Fe New Mexican and the Albuquerque Journal between them describe five different bodies with five different positions.
| Body | Rule on generative AI in filings | Status |
|---|---|---|
| New Mexico Supreme Court | No formal policy; a study committee created about a year ago; interim guidelines to double-check AI work, disclose AI use to clients and obtain consent before entering privileged material | No recommendations yet |
| Chief US District Judge Kenneth J. Gonzales | Bulletin reminding filers that signed documents must be grounded in existing law and that citations to nonexistent cases are sanctionable | Issued May 2025 |
| US District Judge Margaret Strickland | Standing order requiring disclosure of AI use and a certification that the accuracy of any AI-generated portion has been checked | In force |
| State District Judge John P. Sugg, Carrizozo | Own order: disclose AI use at the top of the document and certify the text was checked by traditional methods “or by a human being” | Imposed late March 2026 |
| First Judicial District Attorney’s Office | “We do not have a written AI policy”; staff trained; filings not drafted with AI | No written policy |
| Law Offices of the Public Defender | “Working on finalizing a formal AI policy”; covered in ethics and confidentiality training | Being finalised |
Seven cases before this one
The Albuquerque Journal’s Colleen Heild reported on 12 April 2026 that courts in New Mexico had detected AI hallucinations in at least seven lawsuits since 2023, “sometimes imposing sanctions but more often issuing warnings”. The examples she gave frame the fine for the hallucinated witnesses. A self-represented plaintiff who demanded $355.69 quintillion in damages ended up paying $8,640 in sanctions before Senior US District Judge Judith Herrera.
A lawyer who filed a brief written by out-of-state counsel, containing six invented cases he had not read, was fined $1,500 by US Magistrate Judge Damian MartÃnez of Las Cruces and ordered to report himself to the bar and take an hour of ethics training.
In October 2023 the then chief federal judge for the district, William Johnson, wrote that a pleading before him appeared to be only the second involving nonexistent opinions that a federal court had dealt with.
State District Judge John P. Sugg of Carrizozo told the Journal the cost falls on the bench: “when we’re chasing down a bunch of stuff that doesn’t actually exist, it wastes a lot of our time.” His answer was his own disclosure order, two weeks before the article ran.
What the interim guidance would have required
The Supreme Court’s own interim guidelines, as the New Mexican describes them, ask lawyers to double-check work completed with AI, to disclose AI use to clients, and to obtain consent before entering privileged information. On his own account of the hallucinated witnesses, Aarons met neither of the first two. He did not verify the summary and he did not tell his client. Whether the “other documents related to the case” that he loaded alongside the public transcript were privileged is a question none of the coverage asks.
The guidance is not a rule, and the court did not cite it. It did not need to: the code of conduct Justice Bacon invoked already covers a lawyer who files what he has not read.
What Happens Next After the Hallucinated Witnesses
Two separate tracks now run from the same order, and neither has a date on it.
The appeal starts again
The Law Office of the Public Defender now represents Sandoval, with Kim Chavez Cook assigned on 2 September. Every brief filed so far is struck, so the appeal is back where it stood before the hallucinated witnesses were filed. Cook declined to comment to Reuters, as did the Doña Ana County District Attorney’s office.
Sandoval, 60, from Chaparral, remains in prison on his life sentence. Aarons told The Epoch Times he was “glad the court threw out my defective pleading and ordered the public defender to write a new brief on behalf of my former client”, which is the one point on which he and the justices agree. The hallucinated witnesses cost his client a year of appellate time, and the new brief will have to be written from the transcript rather than from a summary of it.
The disciplinary track
The Disciplinary Board investigates and, per the New Mexican, can impose anything up to disbarment. Aarons is barred from the Supreme Court in the meantime, though nothing in the coverage suggests he is barred from the lower courts where his 38 other cases sit. His stated hope is that the board “takes into account it was an honest mistake”. The order’s finding of a lack of remorse is the document the board will read first.
The 30-day clock
The $5,000 goes to the State Bar’s Client Protection Fund within 30 days of the order, which by our arithmetic is 9 October 2026. That is the only hard date in the whole matter, and it is also the least consequential. For comparison, our report on two news organisations suing OpenAI and Microsoft describes a court process measured in years; this one, from show-cause order to sanction, took weeks.
What OpenAI has said
Nothing. Reuters, The Guardian and The Epoch Times all asked, and all reported no response. The company’s name appears in the order only as the maker of the tool Aarons said produced the hallucinated witnesses.
Hallucinated Witnesses FAQ
Who were the hallucinated witnesses in the Sandoval appeal?
Four people who never testified and, according to the court, do not exist: Officer Michelle Amarillo, Officer Sanchez, Manal Al-Jibury and Teresa Marquez. The brief also attributed false testimony to three real witnesses, Danny Stanton, Linda Stanton and Mariah Chavez, and misrepresented legal authority in multiple cited cases.
How much was the lawyer fined over the hallucinated witnesses, and where does the money go?
$5,000, payable within 30 days to the State Bar of New Mexico’s Client Protection Fund. The fine sits alongside a finding of direct contempt, removal from the case, a bar on appearing before the Supreme Court and a referral to the Disciplinary Board.
Did the court ban ChatGPT in New Mexico filings?
No. Justice Michael E. Vigil said there is nothing wrong with using AI in legal writing, but that a lawyer who signs and files a brief is attesting to having checked it, hallucinated witnesses included. The New Mexico Supreme Court has no formal generative AI policy; a study committee formed about a year ago has issued interim guidelines but no recommendations.
How does this compare with Mata v. Avianca?
The fine is identical, $5,000, and the two orders are 1,175 days apart. Mata involved invented case citations in a civil personal-injury suit. The Sandoval brief involved hallucinated witnesses and fabricated testimony in a criminal appeal, which the database that tracks these cases codes as a fabricated exhibit or submission, a category covering 3.7% of hallucinated items.
What happens to Oscar Sandoval’s appeal now?
It restarts from the beginning with the Law Office of the Public Defender, which was appointed by the court and assigned Kim Chavez Cook on 2 September 2026. All previous briefing is struck, including the brief with the hallucinated witnesses. Sandoval remains in prison serving life plus four and a half years.
How common are hallucinated witnesses compared with fake citations?
Rare. Of 6,039 hallucinated items in the 2,039-case database, 5,326 are case law and 226 are exhibits or submissions. Criminal matters account for 63 of 1,786 field-tagged cases. Hallucinated witnesses in a criminal appeal combine the two smallest categories.
References and Further Reading
Lawyer fined $5K over AI-hallucinated witnesses in a murder case (The Verge, 11 September 2026)
New Mexico lawyer fined for using AI-generated brief containing fabricated testimony (The Guardian)
ChatGPT Made Up Testimony From Fake Police Officers, State Supreme Court Says (The Epoch Times)
NM lawyer AI brief: the New Mexico Supreme Court order (DocumentCloud)
New Mexico Supreme Court Fines Stephen Aarons $5,000: 20 outlets compared (NewsCord)
NM judges see AI mistakes creeping into legal cases (Albuquerque Journal, 12 April 2026)
AI Errors Enter New Mexico State, Federal Case Filings (GovTech)
AI Hallucination Cases Database (Damien Charlotin, updated 12 September 2026)
Mata v. Avianca, Inc. (Wikipedia)
A recent high-profile case of AI hallucination serves as a stark warning (NPR, 10 July 2025)
Why do lawyers keep using ChatGPT? (The Verge, 1 June 2025)
Sandoval convicted in 2024 Mesilla killing (Las Cruces Bulletin)
Oscar Rene Sandoval sentenced to life in prison for murder (KVIA)
Stephen D Aarons: Biography and Credentials (Aarons Law Firm)
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