County of Los Angeles v. Niblett
Key Findings
- Three cited authorities — Montebello Unified School District v. State Board of Education, R.D. v. P.M., and People v. Zermeno — could not be verified to exist at the cited reporter citations.
- Five real cases — including United States v. Rahimi and Waters v. Churchill — are cited for propositions the opinions do not support; Bookout v. Nielsen and Parisi v. Mazzaferro are similarly pulled into territory the courts did not decide.
- Eight additional First Amendment and restraining-order authorities are potentially stretched — applied to workplace-violence-order doctrine in ways the underlying opinions don't cleanly support.
Opine's citation tool initially flagged "Stats. 2023, ch. 286, § 1" as a fabricated statute. On manual review, this is a real California session-law citation — Chapter 286 of the Statutes of 2023 — not a fabrication.
The tool mishandled it because session-law (chaptered bill) citations don't resolve to codified-statute databases the way normal statutory citations do. We've excluded this flag from the counts and badges on this page. When we find these, we publish the correction rather than hide it.
Court Response
Disposition: Affirmed. The court separately issued an Order to Show Cause against appellate counsel Robert W. Lucas asking why he should not be sanctioned “for his misuse of artificial intelligence in briefing this appeal.”
The court identified several specific problems. Montebello Unified School District v. State Board of Education: counsel filed a notice of errata conceding the case "does not appear to exist" and attributing it to "artificial intelligence editing." People v. Zermeno: deleted in the same errata; the court reviewed the real case and found it "does not remotely stand for the principles for which he cited it" (Zermeno was a criminal gang-enhancement case cited for a § 527.3 workplace-speech proposition). R.D. v. P.M. (2021) 68 Cal.App.5th 1012: "a case that does not exist," and the 2011 case counsel may have intended "did not hold that intent to harm is an element of the statutory definition of a credible threat of violence." United States v. Rahimi: counsel represented that Rahimi "invalidated" a federal statute, but "the Rahimi court reversed the judgment of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and upheld the statute." Bookout v. Nielsen: counsel cited "page 1143," but "Bookout ends at page 1142," and the Court of Appeal in that case "actually affirmed the restraining order before it." Scripps Health: the cited pages "do not address any of those issues."
Comparison: Opine flagged Montebello (☠️), R.D. v. P.M. (☠️), and Zermeno (☠️) as fabricated, and Rahimi and Bookout v. Nielsen as significant-issue mischaracterizations — matching five of the six citations the court named. The one citation the court caught that Opine missed is Scripps Health v. Marin. The brief cited Scripps Health at page 335 for the proposition that a credible threat must show “immediacy and specificity”; in fact, that page addresses the separate forward-looking question of whether a petitioner has shown a reasonable probability of future violence — not the elements of what makes a statement a credible threat in the first place. Opine’s analyzer noticed the prong mismatch but rated the citation accurate because the brief’s general thrust (future-harm analysis of § 527.8) aligned with the case’s subject; the court took a more precise view and counted the citation as miscited.
Every other citation in the filing above was checked against the actual opinion or statute it claimed to cite. Fabricated items could not be verified to exist. Mischaracterized items are real cases described incorrectly. Potentially stretched items are real citations applied in ways that push beyond the holding — judgment calls rather than definitive errors.
Opine's citation verification currently covers California state courts and the 9th Circuit — the jurisdictions where our case-law and statute data is comprehensive.