A murder appeal in New Mexico leaned on testimony nobody ever gave, and the state’s Supreme Court has now priced that mistake at $5,000.
Stephen Aarons was held in contempt for handing in a brief that quoted fabricated witnesses. The document also invented details about the shooter’s clothing and appearance. The court’s filing says he neglected his duty to verify the factual claims and the legal authority behind them.
Aarons told an August hearing that he had run the material through ChatGPT and expected a bulletproof summary of the trial. Justice C. Shannon Bacon asked how years of public warnings had passed him by, wondering aloud whether he watched the news or read about the world, Reuters reported. Fabricated citations, she noted, have been front-page material almost daily.
In a statement Aarons said he regrets the filing and hopes the disciplinary board sees an honest mistake.
Two years of similar rulings sit behind this one. Courts have penalized firms that filed invented quotations and lawyers who worked for MyPillow founder Mike Lindell. In most of those cases a single human read-through would have caught the error.
