When Kyle Kjoller, a 57-year-old welder, was ordered held without bail in Nevada County, Calif., in April, he protested. The charges against him — multiple counts of illegal gun possession — were not grave enough under California law to warrant keeping him in jail for months awaiting his trial (article available here).
Prosecutors disagreed, and offered 11 pages’ worth of reasons. But the brief they filed, Mr. Kjoller’s lawyers contend, was rife with errors that bear the hallmarks of generative artificial intelligence.
The lawyers soon turned up briefs in four separate cases, including Mr. Kjoller’s, that were filled with mistakes, all of them from the office of the same prosecutor, District Attorney Jesse Wilson. The mistakes included wholesale misinterpretations of the law, as well as quotations that do not actually appear in the cited texts.
Wilson has acknowledged that the briefs contain numerous errors, but he has said that A.I. was used to draft only one of them, and not the one filed in Kjoller’s case.
That answer has not satisfied Mr. Kjoller’s lawyers, who have asked the California Supreme Court to investigate whether the briefs indicate a “wider pattern” of prosecutors asking courts to rule against defendants “on the basis of nonexistent case citations and holdings.”
“Prosecutors’ reliance on inaccurate legal authority can violate ethical rules, and represents an existential threat to the due process rights of criminal defendants and the legitimacy of the courts,” they wrote.
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