CPS Prosecutor Cited a Nonexistent Case After an AI Search
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Prosecutors who lean on an AI search summary can end up arguing from a case that was never decided. That is what happened when a senior lawyer for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) appeared in the high court in England and Wales.
An invented citation in a child prosecution
Ravinder Dhillon, a senior crown prosecutor in the CPS rape and serious sexual offences unit, argued for prosecuting a boy who was 11 at the time of the alleged rape of his seven-year-old sister. To support her position she cited a case labelled CPS – R v J [2024] EWCA Crim 3529. It does not exist.
The boy's lawyers were challenging the decision to prosecute. They said prosecutors had not weighed representations from social workers, youth workers and a forensic psychologist.
Dhillon took the decision to proceed in April, and the chief crown prosecutor confirmed it. In October she admitted the citation was an error. She said she had meant a real decision made 15 years earlier.
What the judges and the CPS said
Two senior high court judges called her explanation "unsatisfactory." The court said the fictitious reference did not change the outcome of the boy's challenge. His trial in the youth courts is listed for later this week.
The CPS says its AI policy bars the use of AI for legal decisions and requires human checks for accuracy. It said the error came from legal research done on the internet. A rapid internal review looked at how it happened and checked that no other cases were affected. One lesson shared afterwards was that case law must be cited from trusted legal sources.
The Guardian understands the internet search returned an AI summary that held the fictional case details.
A growing record of AI errors in court
This is only the second known CPS case. In February the agency admitted that a lawyer in an extradition case involving two Romanians had cited nonexistent authorities, likely because of AI.
Most AI-related court errors this year came from people without legal training who represent themselves, often in employment tribunals. A UK tracker kept by barrister Matthew Lee now lists 101 confirmed, suspected and disputed cases. He says that may be the tip of the iceberg, since many lower court decisions go unpublished.
Brian Flanagan, an associate professor of law at Maynooth University, called it a "serious failure." Lee also raised privacy and confidentiality risks given how sensitive the CPS's material is.
Our View
For any employer, the lesson is about verification: a summary that reads as confident can still be wrong, and the cost rises when the work is used against a person. The CPS says it has an AI policy, yet the error got through. What the reporting leaves open is how the error passed whatever checks existed, and what the internal review concluded on that point.
Source: The Guardian