Invest1 publisher2 min readPublished
New Mexico fines a lawyer $5,000 for filing witness testimony ChatGPT invented
Stephen Aarons said he used ChatGPT to condense a trial record for a murder appeal, and the New Mexico Supreme Court found the brief he filed quoted witnesses who never existed. It also sent him to a disciplinary board.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- The New Mexico Supreme Court held Santa Fe attorney Stephen Aarons in contempt on Wednesday and ordered him to pay $5,000 over a brief he submitted in a murder appeal.
- The judges said the document he filed contained false testimony from wholly fabricated witnesses, material generated by ChatGPT that he had not verified.
- The court also sent his conduct to an attorney disciplinary board, a second proceeding separate from the contempt finding.
- His client Oscar Renee Sandoval, convicted of killing the mother of his children and sentenced to life last year, still has a pending appeal, which passed to public defender Kim Chavez Cook on September 2.
- The same report describes a separate suit filed Sunday in the Northern District of Florida, in which the family of Tiru Chabba sued OpenAI, ChatGPT and Phoenix Ikner over the Florida State University shooting.
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Why it matters
- cost The fine is fixed at $5,000 and the disciplinary outcome is not, so any firm reading this for a deterrent is waiting on the board.
- contradiction The court found a lack of remorse and the lawyer says he is remorseful, and the board that decides his standing has to choose between those two accounts of the same filing.
- precedent Courts that have sanctioned invented citations now have a finding to cite when the invention is evidence. That finding pushes the verification duty back onto documents a firm already holds.
- exposure Contempt power reaches the summarisation step, so exposure begins at the moment nobody compares the model's condensed version against the underlying record.
The task he described is the cheapest kind to verify. A condensation has a source document, and he had it. Aarons said he used ChatGPT last year to condense the trial record after taking the appeal, and that he had not realised how confidently the software could produce facts that never happened [6].
The order carries one figure, $5,000, and the second consequence carries no figure at all, because the disciplinary board has not ruled [1]. The judges said Aarons had "demonstrated a lack of remorse and a lack of concern for his client" [5]. Cryptopolitan reported him telling reporters something else: "I am remorseful but hopeful that the disciplinary board takes into account it was an honest mistake" [9]. He also said, "It is a lesson learned for all professionals who rely upon this powerful but sometimes unstable technology" [10].
Lawyers in state and federal courts have already been punished over briefs containing fake cases, references and misquoted legal provisions [11]. Cryptopolitan describes this filing as standing apart because what was invented was witness testimony inside an appeal [12]. A citation can be checked by anyone with database access. A witness who does not exist is caught only by someone who has read the record.
The same report carries a claim pointed the other way. Bakari Sellers, the attorney for Tiru Chabba's family, said the exchanges go back about 18 months and total around 16,000 "disturbing chats" [14], and said of Phoenix Ikner: "He literally utilized open AI and Chat GPT as his co-conspirator, utilized it as a resource to carry out mass murder" [15]. OpenAI's spokesperson Drew Pusateri said, "Last year's mass shooting at Florida State University was a tragedy, but ChatGPT is not responsible for this terrible crime" [16]. Pusateri also said the company found an account it believed was associated with Ikner after learning what had happened and shared the information with police [17].
One proceeding puts the duty on the professional who signed the output; the other asks a federal court to put it on the model's supplier [3]. New Mexico answered the first with a sum a mid-sized practice could absorb without changing anything about how work gets checked.
So the deterrent depends on the board. If it accepts the honest-mistake account and imposes nothing, the full priced cost of filing invented witness testimony in a murder appeal is $5,000 [3][4].
What to watch
- Whether Kim Chavez Cook refiles the appeal brief, and how the court treats the fabricated passages already on the docket.
- Whether OpenAI moves to dismiss the Chabba complaint on the ground Pusateri stated publicly, that ChatGPT is not responsible for the crime.
- Whether other state courts cite this contempt finding when the fabricated material is evidence.