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The sanctions record · U.S. Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit, 2026

United States v. Farris

No. 25-5623 (6th Cir. 2026) · per curiam opinion of Clay, Gibbons and Hermandorfer, JJ., decided and filed 3 April 2026, recommended for publication

Page verified 5 August 2026. Quotations are from the published opinion, linked below.

The first case on this record where the penalty was not money. Court-appointed defence counsel admitted using Westlaw’s CoCounsel to draft two appellate briefs and filing them without verifying the output. He was removed from the case, denied every dollar of his Criminal Justice Act compensation, and referred three ways, despite a full admission and a clean forty-year record.

The timeline

  • 2024–2025Steven N. Howe is appointed under the Criminal Justice Act to represent John C. Farris, who pleads guilty and appeals a leadership-role sentencing enhancement. No. 2:24-cr-00028-1 (E.D. Ky.).
  • Aug 2025Howe’s office acquires Westlaw CoCounsel, after the district court proceedings had concluded.
  • BriefingHowe files a principal brief and a reply. The court’s first suspicion is the file name of the principal brief: “CoCounsel Skill Results.”
  • 23 Feb 2026Show-cause order issued, requiring Howe to produce every authority from Westlaw or Lexis and to state who wrote the briefs, whether generative AI was used, how each brief was cite-checked, and whether AI was used in the district court.
  • 3 Apr 2026The opinion issues. Howe is removed, uncompensated and referred.

What the AI did

Howe directed an unnamed staff member to upload district court documents to CoCounsel to produce a first draft, then worked in the same file for six hours to supplement it, and repeated that process for the reply. Three quotations in the resulting briefs appear in no legal authority. The briefs also misstated the holdings of two real Sixth Circuit cases, United States v. Washington and United States v. Anthony, asserting that enhancements had been reversed where they had been upheld.

“That Howe’s briefs cited real legal authorities, as opposed to ‘hallucinations’ featuring fictitious cases, does not absolve him.”

This is the point most likely to be missed. Every citation in the brief was to a case that exists. The failure was in the quotations and the characterisations, which is exactly the failure mode a citation checker does not catch.

What the court did, and why

The court accepted Howe’s candour and noted it was his first such matter in forty years. It ordered the consequences anyway:

  • No fee“Howe shall not be compensated under the Criminal Justice Act for his time spent on this appeal.”
  • RemovedBy separate order the same day, Howe was removed from further representation, replacement counsel appointed, the briefs he filed locked, and the briefing schedule reset.
  • ReferralsTo the Chief Judge of the Sixth Circuit for discipline under Local Rule 46, and to the Chief Judge and Clerk of the Eastern District of Kentucky and the Disciplinary Clerk of the Kentucky Bar Association.
“Howe’s reliance on ‘staff’, rather than himself or another attorney, to supervise the artificial-intelligence-generated work product fell short of his obligations as attorney of record.”

The court also set out, without claiming to exhaust them, the steps it regards as relevant: reviewing and validating AI output; considering disclosure to or informed consent from clients; safeguarding confidential and privileged information; firm-wide AI policies; ethical billing when using AI tools; and keeping current with jurisdiction-specific guidance.

What it changed

Three firsts on this record. It is the first criminal matter. It is the first case where the sanction is professional rather than financial, and heavier for it: a fee denial plus removal is a worse outcome than most of the fines. And it is the first where the court named a mainstream, vendor-supplied legal AI product and said that a trusted provider is no defence, citing empirical work on the reliability of leading AI legal research tools.

The aggravating factor was who the client was. “That Howe was serving as court-appointed counsel for an indigent defendant through a publicly funded program only compounds the harm to our system of justice.”

The lesson for the next filing

Delegating the verification to staff is not verification, and a citation checker would have passed these briefs. What failed here was the quotation and the characterisation, which only a person who read the case can catch, and only a dated record can prove afterwards that you did.

Generate the certification →  ·  Read your judge’s AI order →

Sources

  • Published opinion, No. 25-5623 (6th Cir. PDF, 3 Apr 2026)
  • Cited within: Whiting v. City of Athens, 2026 WL 710568 (6th Cir. 2026); Fletcher v. Experian Info. Sols., Inc., 168 F.4th 231 (5th Cir. 2026)
  • Also cited by the court: A.B.A. Formal Op. 512 (2024); Magesh et al., “Hallucination-Free? Assessing the Reliability of Leading AI Legal Research Tools,” J. Empirical Legal Stud. (2025)

Related

Checked 5 August 2026 against the court’s own published opinion. Information, not legal advice.

Information, not legal advice. Every entry is verified against the court’s own document or contemporaneous reporting; where a source is reporting rather than the document, we say so.