MANHATTAN (CN) — A federal judge in New York City on Wednesday declined to impose punitive sanctions on Donald Trump’s former personal fixer, Michael Cohen, who said he had unwittingly provided bogus, artificial intelligence-generated case citations to his attorney before they were submitted to a judge.
“Given the amount of press and attention that Google Bard and other generative artificial intelligence tools have received, it is surprising that Cohen believed it to be a ‘super-charged search engine’ rather than a ‘generative text service,’” U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman wrote in his opinion. “But the court has no basis to question Cohen’s representation that he believed the cases to be real.”
The Obama-appointed judge found insufficient evidence of bad faith.
It would have “been downright irrational” for Cohen to turn over fake cases for his lawyer David M. Schwartz to include in the motion knowing they were fake, the judge said, "given the probability that Schwartz would discover the problem himself and not include the cases in the motion (as he should have) or, failing that, that the issue would be discovered by the government or court, with potentially serious adverse consequences for Cohen himself.”
Cohen, who is expected to be a key witness in the Manhattan District Attorney’s upcoming criminal trial over Trump’s coverup of hush money payments around the 2016 presidential election, cited the phony court rulings in a brief filed in the Southern District of New York seeking to have his post-prison supervision sentence end early.
In addition to the ruling on sanctions, Furman denied Cohen’s fourth application to terminate his supervised release, suggesting Cohen likely had committed perjury either when he pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge William Pauley in August 2018 or in subsequent testimony denying that he had, in fact, evaded taxes.
"At a minimum, Cohen’s ongoing and escalating efforts to walk away from his prior acceptance of responsibility for his crimes are manifest evidence of the ongoing need for specific deterrence," the judge wrote.
Cohen’s personal attorney, E. Danya Perry, called the sanctions ruling “an important win,” but challenged the perjury characterization as “factually inaccurate and legally incorrect.”
In a sworn declaration unsealed in December, Cohen explained that he had not kept up with “emerging trends (and related risks) in legal technology,” and had used Google's Bard AI software for case citations thinking it was “a super-charged search engine.” He did not realize it was a generative AI service like Chat-GPT that "could show citations and descriptions that looked real but actually were not."
Citing his current status as a disbarred “non-lawyer,” Cohen told the judge he expected his lawyer to make the final reviews and confirmations of the case citations he suggested to support his motion to end supervision.
"I did not know that Google Bard could generate non-existent cases, nor did I have access to Westlaw or other standard resources for confirming the details of cases,” Cohen wrote in the declaration.
Cohen, 57, pleaded guilty in August 2018 to financial charges committed during his work with the former president, admitting to making an unlawful corporate contribution of $150,000 and a separate excessive campaign contribution of $130,000, both knowingly and with the intent of influencing a federal election.
Facing a consecutive maximum sentence of 65 years on his guilty pleas, Cohen agreed in a plea deal not to challenge any sentence between 46 and 63 months.
He ultimately served one-third of a three-year sentence at Federal Correctional Institution, Otisville, in Orange County, New York before he was transferred to home confinement due to his high risk for serious illness and death during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Cohen’s use of generative AI software to generate legal citations in his bid to terminate his condition of supervised release was the second incident in 2023 that a judge in Manhattan federal court weighed punishment over attorneys’ use of artificial intelligence technology. U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel ordered two attorneys each to pay $5,000 after they submitted legal briefs in a personal injury case using fictitious case citations invented by the AI chatbot ChatGPT.
Follow @jruss_jruss
Subscribe to Closing Arguments
Sign up for new weekly newsletter Closing Arguments to get the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and hot cases and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world.
Additional Reads
-
Southern California bird smuggler sentenced to time served April 12, 2024 -
