# A lawyer let ChatGPT invent witnesses

> A New Mexico defense attorney filed a murder appeal brief full of testimony from people who never existed.
- Title: A lawyer let ChatGPT invent witnesses · Pymnts | Shortify
- Summary: A New Mexico defense attorney filed a murder appeal brief full of testimony from people who never existed. AI output is a draft, not a filing. If you did not…
- Keywords: ai hallucinations, legal tech, chatgpt, ethics, courts, business, finance, lawyer, let, invent, witnesses, Pymnts
- Source: Pymnts — https://pymnts.com/news/artificial-intelligence/2026/lawyer-sanctioned-after-ai-generates-fake-witnesses-in-murder-appeal
- Author: PYMNTS
- Published: 2026-09-13T23:35:03+00:00
- Read time: 1 min
- Topics: ai hallucinations, legal tech, chatgpt, ethics, courts, business, finance
## Held in contempt
New Mexico's Supreme Court found defense attorney Stephen Aarons in direct contempt on Sept. 9 for a murder appeal brief built on people who never testified.

> false testimony from wholly fabricated witnesses
## Referred for discipline
The court sent Aarons to a disciplinary board, saying he showed no remorse and no concern for the client whose appeal he had just poisoned.

> demonstrated a lack of remorse and a lack of concern for his client
## He checked nothing
Aarons admitted he verified none of the facts or legal authority before filing, and never told his client the brief was riddled with misrepresentations.
## Bulletproof, he assumed
He told the court he used ChatGPT running OpenAI's o3 model and trusted it because AI is used so widely in law and medicine.

> I assumed that it generated a bulletproof summary of proceedings
## Head in the sand
Justice C. Shannon Bacon said hallucinations are a daily front-page story, so claiming ignorance was itself a choice.

> either you buried your head in the sand ... or you took a gamble, and neither of those are consistent with the code of conduct
## The profession is split
Law schools have started banning AI in classrooms, while 87% of corporate legal departments now report using generative AI, up from 44% a year earlier.

> Generative AI has become a fixture in the majority of legal departments
## Key takeaway

AI output is a draft, not a filing. If you did not check every citation and fact yourself, you did not do the work.