Courts on AI / Fabricated or misquoted citations

Olbera v. Sykes

Court of Appeals of Indiana · State appellate courts · IN · 2026-03-30 · 2026 WL 860644 · No. 25A-JP-2005 · opinion

On 2026-03-30, Indiana Court of Appeals reached the merits despite briefing defects and warned that the self-represented brief included an apparently hallucinated Indiana case. A self-represented party submitted a brief with fabricated or nonexistent authorities, including Pavan v. Smith. The warning applied to later filings in the same case.

Disposition: The court reversed the trial court's paternity and dissolution rulings in part and remanded with instructions while deciding the appeal on the merits despite issues in Sykes's pro se brief.
Recorded conduct: Sykes's pro se appellee brief failed to include record citations in the statement of facts, failed to support arguments with relevant authority, and cited one seemingly hallucinated case, S.S. v. D.M., 150 N.E.3d 663 (Ind. Ct. App. 2020). — outcome: noted, no consequence; actor: litigant in person
Canonical record: Incident tracker entry — verified outcome, regulator disposition and related rules

What the court wrote

Verbatim from the court's document (public domain). Ellipses mark omitted text; nothing is paraphrased.

Sykes defends against this appeal pro se. “It is well settled that pro se litigants are held to the same legal standards as licensed attorneys” and must accept the consequences of their failure to follow established rules of procedure. Basic v. Amouri, 58 N.E.3d 980, 983 (Ind. Ct. App. 2016), reh'g denied. Although we've identified multiple issues with Sykes’ brief, such as her failure to include citations to the record in her statement of facts, her failure to support her arguments with citations to relevant authority, and a citation to one seemingly hallucinated case (S.S. v. D.M., 150 N.E.3d 663 (Ind. Ct. App. 2020)), “we prefer to decide issues on the merits” and her noncompliance with our appellate rules has not been “so substantial as to impede our consideration of the issues[.]”

Court document: damiencharlotin.com
Read: 2026-09-07 · court document read from a public copy; the court's own copy was not found online when checked (see notes)provisional
Found via: charlotin-hallucinations-db
Notes: Official copy not obtained 2026-09-08: Indiana Decisions host timed out while checking robots/search/document API; official document was not fetched (checked public.courts.in.gov). Re-coded from the document 2026-09-08 (independent second read).

United States court documents are public domain; the topic coding, disposition line and summary are SafeLegalAI's reading of the document for comparison, not a finding about any person named in it. This record summarises a public court document or official publication and reports what it says; SafeLegalAI makes no findings of its own. Individuals and organisations are named only as they appear in that public record. Anyone named may send a right of reply, correction or contextual update (for example an appeal, vacatur or later disposition) via /report; we add a dated note where appropriate. Reply or correct this record.

compiled by the SafeLegalAI editorial teammethodas of 2026-09-08v0.2.2coding CC BY 4.0JSON Hugging Face GitHub