AEV-2026-0064

An attorney signed and filed a ChatGPT drafted appellate brief with fabricated witness testimony, unverified

The Supreme Court of New Mexico held attorney Stephen Aarons in direct contempt after finding he used ChatGPT to prepare an appellate brief containing false testimony from wholly fabricated witnesses and misrepresented legal authority, and that he did not verify either before signing and filing it. Decided 9 September 2026 in State v. Sandoval, S-1-SC-40845.

AESS 4.9 mediumConfirmedStatus: publishedEvent: 9 September 2026Execution AuthorityApproval ControlsHuman Oversight

Affected

Organisation: unknown
Product: An attorney's own AI assisted brief preparation workflow, using ChatGPT as the drafting tool
Component: The attorney's own independent verification step between an AI assisted draft and a signed, filed, consequential court document
Versions: unknown
Configurations: Outside counsel personally used a general purpose AI chatbot to prepare appellate brief content; No independent verification of the tool's factual claims or cited legal authority was performed before the attorney signed and filed the brief

Execution authority facts

Fields the evidence does not establish are shown as unknown rather than guessed.

Intended task: Prepare and file an appellate brief in a criminal appeal, State v. Sandoval, before the Supreme Court of New Mexico
Agent: The attorney of record, Stephen Aarons, using ChatGPT to prepare brief content
Delegating actor: Stephen Aarons himself, as counsel of record
Action: Signed and filed an appellate brief containing testimony from fabricated witnesses and misrepresented legal authority, having used ChatGPT to prepare it and without independently verifying its factual claims or cited authority beforehand
Target resource: The Supreme Court of New Mexico's own docket and record in State v. Sandoval, and the court's reliance on filed briefing as accurate
Environment: A criminal appeal before the Supreme Court of New Mexico
Credentials used: unknown
Privileges available: The ordinary authority of an attorney of record to sign and file briefing with the court
Authority presented: A brief signed and filed as counsel of record, presented as an accurate and properly supported representation to the court
Authority required: An attorney's duty to independently verify the factual claims and legal authority in a document before signing and filing it with the court
Applicable policy: The attorney's professional and procedural duty of candor to the court, certified by Aarons' own signature on the filing
Approval mechanism: unknown
Required approver: unknown
Independent approval: no
Action binding: unknown
Sequence context: Aarons used ChatGPT to prepare the brief, then signed and filed it. The order does not establish any internal review step between preparation and filing; his own admission is that he did not verify the factual claims or the cited legal authority at any point before the filing reached the court.

Impact

Consequence: Fabricated witness testimony and misrepresented legal authority reached the court's own docket as filed briefing in a criminal appeal, and the court held Aarons in direct contempt, struck all briefing filed in the matter, replaced counsel, referred him for professional discipline, barred him from appearing before the court pending that process, and imposed a five thousand dollar sanction
Reach: Confined to this one criminal appeal, its attorney of record and his client's own case; not established to have affected any other filing or matter
Reversibility: The struck briefing was replaced by new counsel, correcting the immediate procedural defect. The contempt finding, the five thousand dollar sanction and the referral for professional discipline against Aarons are not themselves undone by that replacement
Detectability: unknown
Propagation: none
Recovery: The court struck all briefing filed in the matter and appointed replacement counsel. The discipline referral and the bar on Aarons appearing before the court pending its outcome remain open as of the order, not resolved by it

Evidence

Primary sources

State v. Sandoval, S-1-SC-40845, Dispositional Order of Direct Contempt (Supreme Court of New Mexico) (Justia)

Supporting sources

Recordings of Oral Arguments, 2026 (Show Cause Hearing: State v. Sandoval, S-1-SC-40845) (Supreme Court of New Mexico)
ChatGPT invented fake police testimony in murder appeal, New Mexico high court says (Reuters)

Reproduction status: Not independently reproduced. The underlying facts rest on the Supreme Court of New Mexico's own dispositional order, mirrored in full text by Justia, corroborated by the court's own recordings-of-oral-arguments listing for the case's show cause hearing and by Reuters' independent reporting of the same sanction and dollar figure
Evidence state: Confirmed

Known unknowns

The full text of the appellate brief and the specific fabricated witnesses or misrepresented authority beyond the three excerpts captured here
How the fabrications were first discovered, and by whom
The eventual outcome of the professional discipline referral against Aarons

Limitations

The court's written order was accessed through Justia's third party mirror rather than a court hosted written-order URL directly. The official court site independently confirms the case number and the show cause hearing, not the full order text
This entry rests on three captured excerpts rather than the order's complete text, so any fact outside those excerpts and the two corroborating sources is stated as unknown rather than inferred

Claim provenance

verified
The court's own Dispositional Order of Direct Contempt, mirrored in full text by Justia. Admitted through Moona's canonical upstream EVIDENCE_BUNDLE path rather than an independent re-fetch in this session; three excerpts were captured and traced into the claim to evidence mapping this entry relies on, content addressed as a raw discovery artifact at sha256:2614f0b97237a363007005a00a29f6b9b8a60de801f57891f166f5fe4eaee2fb.
Authorized to Draft Is Not Authorized to File
independent-reporting
The court's own docket listing for the case's show cause hearing, confirming the case number independently of the order text itself. Supplied as corroboration in the upstream EVIDENCE_BUNDLE rather than independently re-fetched in this session.
Authorized to Draft Is Not Authorized to File
independent-reporting
Reuters' own reporting, independently corroborating the contempt finding, the fabricated testimony, the ChatGPT attribution and the five thousand dollar sanction. Supplied as corroboration in the upstream EVIDENCE_BUNDLE rather than independently re-fetched in this session.
Authorized to Draft Is Not Authorized to File

AESS 0.1 severity

4.9medium

AESS:0.1/C:M/R:S/RV:P/PG:N/AM:F/HC:B/BI:X/AU:S/P:L/DT:D

Consequencematerial
Reachsingle
Reversibilityrecoverable
Propagationnone
Authority mismatchfull
Human controlblocking
Binding integrityunknown
Autonomysupervised
Privilegeminimal
Detectabilitydelayed

The score is derived from these stored dimension values by the versioned calculator. Identical inputs always produce the identical score. Specification

Weakness classes

AEW-003 Execution authority collapsed into capability to prepare

Change history

2026-09-12
Created from a Moona Intelligence Radar signal: the Supreme Court of New Mexico's Dispositional Order of Direct Contempt in State v. Sandoval, S-1-SC-40845, decided 9 September 2026, finding that attorney Stephen Aarons used ChatGPT to prepare an appellate brief containing false testimony from wholly fabricated witnesses and misrepresented legal authority, and that he did not verify either before signing and filing it. Deduplication checked Intelligence, the Risk Registry and the protocol dataset for this case, for Aarons by name, and for an equivalent AI fabricated court filing incident with professional sanctions, and found none. Instantiates the existing AEW-003, execution authority collapsed into capability to prepare, rather than a new weakness: the authority gap, capability to prepare a document treated as authority to file it, is the identical one that weakness already states, extended here from an agent holding both roles to a human professional who occupied the separate role and did not perform the verification it required. Evidence admitted through the canonical upstream EVIDENCE_BUNDLE path (admitUpstreamEvidenceBundle) rather than an independent re-fetch in this session: three captured excerpts from the court's own order, mirrored in full text by Justia, corroborated by the court's own recordings-of-oral-arguments listing and by Reuters' independent reporting of the same sanction. Raw signal bytes captured through captureRadarSignalArtifact at sha256:2614f0b97237a363007005a00a29f6b9b8a60de801f57891f166f5fe4eaee2fb, occurrence occ-moona_intelligence_radar-2614f0b97237-1.
2026-09-12
Published: a judicial dispositional order is direct, first party evidentiary proof of the sanctioned conduct, corroborated by the court's own separate docket listing and by independent journalism reporting the same sanction. The affected actor, the attorney of record, and the consequential action, signing and filing a brief with fabricated content, are both identifiable, and this entry instantiates a published weakness, AEW-003, clearing the publication gate.