Casemine's Amicus. An invented case and a misattributed phrase in one filing.
Safe Choice, LLC sued the City of Cleveland in the Northern District of Ohio. After the City moved for judgment on the pleadings, plaintiff's counsel Arleesha Wilson filed an opposition brief. The court had already ordered her to show cause why her conduct did not violate Rule 11.
The court found three problems: she cited four cases that do not exist, she misrepresented the holdings of seven real cases, and she repeated those misrepresentations in a "final" brief handed to the court at a hearing. For example, she cited Huffman v. County of Los Angeles for a conspiracy proposition, but the word "conspiracy" never appears in that opinion, and the supporting quotes she offered were invented.
Rather than concede the errors in her show-cause response, Wilson doubled down. The court found her response itself contained fabricated quotes from at least seven more cases, several from the Sixth Circuit, which signaled to the court that she was still using an AI tool and not verifying its output.
Offered for: controlling case-law authority
The court found Wilson violated Rule 11 and imposed sanctions sua sponte. It ordered her to pay a $7,500 penalty to the Clerk of Courts within 30 days, set above the typical range because she had not been deterred. It also ordered her to send copies of the orders and her response to the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association's grievance committee and to her client, and to file the orders with the state court on remand.
Kingsfield returned REJECT. The court could not find the opinion. The same brief attributed a 'fresh injury' phrase to a Sixth Circuit case that never used it.
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.