Lawyer Fined $5K Over AI-Hallucinated Witnesses in a Murder Case
The New Mexico Supreme Court held Santa Fe defence lawyer Stephen Aarons in contempt, fined him $5,000 and removed him from a life-sentence murder appeal after his ChatGPT-assisted brief quoted four witnesses who do not exist and three who never said what it claimed. We read the 9 September order as quoted by the outlets that saw it, the 21 August hearing coverage, the trial record behind the appeal, and the 2,039-case AI hallucination database, and counted where this case departs from the fake-citation cases that came before it.