Prosecutor accused of AI hallucinations in habeas brief

Civil rights lawyers working on a habeas corpus petition are accusing Nevada County prosecutors of secretly infecting their pleadings with artificial intelligence hallucinations.

The prosecutors denied it and allegedly threatened the defense lawyers with disciplinary action unless they stopped complaining.

What is believed to be the first case of alleged AI fabrications in a criminal matter is now before the state Supreme Court, after lower courts rejected requests to investigate the matter and impose sanctions.

The issue arose when lawyers at Civil Rights Corps, working with the public defender in Nevada County, challenged the pretrial incarceration of a man locked up on a gun charge because he could not make bail.

The lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition, pointing out that under the high court's 2021 In re Humphrey opinion, the inmate's incarceration was unlawful.

In response, Nevada County District Attorney Jesse D. Wilson filed an answer that contained fabricated authority, misrepresentations of the record and mischaracterizations of accurate authorities, according to Civil Rights Corps' petition for review. Kjoller v. Superior Court of Nevada County, S293723 (Sup. Ct., filed Oct. 30, 2025).

The prosecutor's brief also cited a constitutional provision that has nothing to do with pretrial detention and release, the petition states.

A message left for Wilson did not receive a response by press time on Tuesday.

"The number and nature of the errors strongly suggested that the document had been prepared by generative AI," the high court petition adds. Civil Rights Corps lawyers called for an investigation into how that could have occurred, plus sanctions.

After the lawyers brought the issue to opposing counsel's attention, a deputy district attorney and her supervisor called the assistant public defender on the case and asked him to withdraw the sanctions motion, claiming the fabricated authorities were real lower court cases, the petition claims. The supervisor suggested that the deputy public defender might be vulnerable to disciplinary action for filing a sanctions motion without a good faith basis, the petition says.

The 3d District Court of Appeal denied the sanctions motion without explanation. The district attorney attempted to explain the error-filled brief by filing an additional brief that read in part that claims of cites to multiple fake cases are untrue. "There are errored citations; however, the errored citations belong to real cases" and were included due to "scrivener's errors."

In an email included in court papers, Civil Rights Corps senior attorney Carson White recounted a conversation she said she had with one of the prosecutors, Madison J. Maxwell: "Madison told me that the errored citations in the response were not intentionally included and were purely a result of her working on multiple matters, being constantly in court, responding to multiple briefings, and going too fast in her research and drafting. She told me that these were all real cases that she was reading for different motions and had them open in several different tabs, which is how the confusion happened."

Reached by phone Tuesday, Maxwell declined to comment.

In the petition for review, Carson spelled out the stakes:

"The grave reality is that neither the Public Defender's Office -- which is appointed to the lion's share of the criminal cases in Nevada County but has a budget less than half that of the District Attorney's Office -- or an overburdened trial court bench have the resources to shepardize every case in every one of the District Attorney's filings. The District Attorney's repeated citations to fabricated authority is a recipe for disaster. That risk is further compounded by the fact that the District Attorney's Office is apparently not treating its repeated submission of fabricated authority as an urgent problem--or, indeed, acknowledging it at all."