LLMMedium
Oklahoma Judge Reportedly Used ChatGPT-Generated Fictitious Case Citations in Family-Law Order
- Occurred
- Nov 19, 2025
- Published
- Sep 9, 2026
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
Stephens County, Oklahoma, Associate District Judge Lawrence Wheeler reportedly used ChatGPT for legal research while preparing a family-law order that cited at least two nonexistent cases. The order denied a request for a psychological evaluation and reprimanded the requesting attorney; Wheeler later vacated it after the attorney challenged it before the Oklahoma Supreme Court.
Developers
- OpenAI
- Chatbot developers
- Large language developers
Deployers
- Lawrence Wheeler
- District Court of Stephens County (Oklahoma)
- Judges
- Legal professionals
Harmed parties
- Michael Beason
- Parties to legal proceedings
- Judicial integrity
- Epistemic integrity
- Adriane Capers
Classification
Category confidence: 95%
Severity confidence: 90%
Rationale: Judge used AI to generate false legal citations, representing a significant LLM hallucination incident in a judicial context.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8