New Mexico Supreme Court imposes $5,000 sanction for fabricated testimony
Inside Practice · SEPTEMBER 16, 2026 · 1 MIN READ
On September 11, Reuters reported that the New Mexico Supreme Court held lawyer Stephen Aarons in contempt, fined him $5,000 and referred him for discipline after an appellate filing attributed invented testimony to nonexistent police witnesses. The court reassigned the murder appeal, and Aarons said he had used ChatGPT while preparing the brief. For law firms and legal departments, the incident expands the familiar hallucinated-citation problem into factual-record fabrication, where ordinary citation checking is not enough. Review controls should require record-level verification of quoted testimony, named witnesses and procedural facts, with responsibility assigned to the filing lawyer rather than delegated to a general AI policy.