This is an appeal from a criminal trial. The Georgia Supreme Court appears to have noticed that the prosecutor’s memorandum and proposed order (denying Ms. Payne a new trial) was prepared with hallucinated citations and was prepared by artificial intelligence. The case is an important one. Under Georgia law, if you are convicted of murder you receive a life sentence.
Hannah Payne was sentenced to life in prison for murder. She intervened after she witnessed a traffic collision and attempted to make a citizen’s arrest of a man who had engaged in reckless driving and had caused an accident. During the confrontation she shot the reckless driver who died. The jury apparently found that her actions were unreasonable and she was convicted of murder and sentenced to natural life in prison. The prosecutor apparently cited nonexistent cases in her briefs in the trial court and the Georgia Supreme Court. Unfortunately for the State, the trial court cited the nonexistent cases in its order denying Ms. Payne a new trial.
Ms. Payne’s appeal presents real issues. Did she have the right to do a citizen’s arrest of the victim? Were her actions in the altercation reasonable? Obviously, she has a right to pursue her appeal. There is a nonzero chance that the hallucinated citations played a role in the conviction of Ms. Payne and in the trial court’s decision to deny her new trial motion. She may still lose the appeal, but she is fortunate that the prosecutor made an obvious error in using artificial intelligence to draft briefs. This gives her appeal, which has some merit in my view, a chance of success. There is a group of people who believe that everyone charged with a crime is guilty. I do not share that view. Ms. Payne may have acted reasonably in drawing a gun to make a citizen’s arrest of a reckless driver. Her conviction may be unjust. Her sentence of life in prison is clearly unjust, but that is Georgia law. Without the prosecutor’s use of hallucinated cases, the conviction would have been affirmed and no one would have paid any attention to this case. A young woman’s life would be completely wasted behind bars.
The prosecutor will, no doubt, face discipline for the hallucinated case citations. That isn’t the real story. The real story is how few criminal cases actually receive the scrutiny they deserve.
Here are citations to some of the news stories covering this case:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/did-phantom-cases-end-murder-205550482.html