Apologises
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has admitted putting hallucinated case law in front of the High Court, after a judge found that two of the authorities it relied on in an extradition appeal were “non-existent”.
Mr Justice Sweeting made the finding in a recent ruling, dismissing appeals brought by two individuals fighting extradition to Romania to serve sentences there. The CPS was opposing the appeals.
The two fake cases first appeared in the CPS’s grounds of opposition, before being carried forward into a further document drafted by junior counsel. They were not identified at the permission stage, despite being before the court at that point. By the time the skeleton argument was filed in February, the false citations were no longer relied upon, though the document did not explain why.
The CPS told the court the errors were “likely to have originated from the use of artificial intelligence”, but said the real cause was human error rather than the technology itself, stating that “the operative cause was human error in the failure to verify the authorities relied upon in formal submissions placed before the Court”.
It described the episode as “an isolated incident arising from inadequate checking of written work”, not a “deliberate attempt to mislead”.
Sweeting J accepted the apology, noting the errors were identified before the hearing and so had “no impact on argument or the court’s judgment”. He said he nonetheless considered it necessary to set out what had happened “given the serious consequences that an error of this nature might have had in other circumstances”.
The CPS said it had carried out a “full internal review”, including checking nearly 80 other cases handled by the same lawyer, none of which raised “similar issues”.
“It would be naive to assume that there will not be an increasing use of artificial intelligence in legal work in future,” Sweeting J said, adding that this may be “both necessary and beneficial”. He said the episode “highlights the risks of its use without appropriate oversight particularly for legal research”.
A spokesperson for the CPS said:
“We apologised to the court for this error made in legal submissions. As soon as this was identified, we carried out an internal review to establish how this occurred and to check no other cases were affected and that any learning was identified to prevent a recurrence. The judge has made clear the error had no impact on legal arguments or the court’s eventual judgment and accepted our apology.”