Cetient, in a suit naming the Texas Governor. Six fabricated cases in the filings.
David R. Pete, proceeding pro se, sued Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton in their official capacities. The court referred the matter to a magistrate judge for pretrial proceedings.
On November 20, 2025, the court ordered Pete to show cause why he should not be sanctioned under Rule 11(b) for his misuse of artificial intelligence in the case. The magistrate judge held an in-person show-cause hearing on January 6, 2026, then issued a Report and Recommendation on May 7, 2026 finding sanctions warranted. She recommended two $100 fines for Pete's factual misrepresentations to the court, one for filings before the hearing and one for filings after it. Pete filed objections on June 2, 2026, after his fourteen-day objection period had expired, without moving for leave to file late or explaining the delay.
Offered for: supporting authority in the filing
Reviewing the Report and Recommendation for clear error and finding none, the district court adopted it. The court sanctioned Pete under Rule 11(b) and ordered him to pay the court $100 for his factual misrepresentations before the show-cause hearing and $100 for the misrepresentations in his March 25 motion. The court further dismissed the case under Rule 41(b) for Pete's failure to pay the filing fee as instructed on October 14, 2025, and directed that a final judgment be entered.
Kingsfield returned REJECT. The court confirmed at the hearing that this citation was hallucinated by AI. At least five other cited cases were also fabricated.
This matter is among the US case-law cases we ran Kingsfield against in the Charlotin benchmark. Kingsfield's existence check confirms every citation against the case-law corpus and an independent source (CourtListener) before any claim resting on it can stand. Across the run Kingsfield ruled 696 of 700 testable claims correctly, including every one of the 504 fabricated citations and 92 fabricated quotes.
Honest scope. This measures Kingsfield's ruling layer given an extracted citation, not an end-to-end run over a full brief. The case record and the AI-tool attribution come from Damien Charlotin's public database and the court order; the verdict is Kingsfield's. See the full 700-claim benchmark.