Mississippi federal judge removed all four lawyers from a case after both sides filed AI-hallucinated citations
At a Glance
- Serious damage. Customer data affected, security incident, or financial losses $10k–$100k.
Independent project · aggregated from public reports and may be unverified — see the primary source below · not affiliated with or endorsed by any company or product named.
What Happened
In the contract dispute between Tom Withers III and the City of Aberdeen, both legal teams filed briefs containing fabricated legal citations produced by generative AI. On 8 June 2026 US District Judge Sharion Aycock of the Northern District of Mississippi issued a sanction order finding Rule 11 violations and removed all four attorneys from the case: Kathleen Wilson, Shauncey Hunter Ridgeway, Mark McClinton and Kathryn Young Williams. Two of them, Ridgeway and McClinton, were barred from appearing before Northern District of Mississippi courts for two years. Judge Aycock wrote that their practice of blindly relying on technology resulted in the hallucinatory citations in their filings, and at a January 2026 hearing attorney Kathleen Wilson testified she did not know AI could hallucinate sources.
Case Analysis
Verified Facts
- The sanction order was issued 8 June 2026 by Judge Sharion Aycock
- All four attorneys were removed from the case and two were barred from the district for two years
- Both sides, not just one, filed briefs containing AI-fabricated citations
Not Publicly Confirmed
- Which AI tool produced the citations
- What the sanctions cost the clients
Operational Lessons
- Every citation an AI produces must be opened and read before it reaches a filing
- Not knowing that models hallucinate is not a defence a court will accept
Primary Source
AI Hallucinations Prompt Mississippi Judge to Boot All Lawyers From Case for 'Blindly Relying on Technology' (Mississippi Free Press)mississippifreepress.org ↗Case Record
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