The Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC) has agreed to investigate “a possible violation of procedural good faith” on the part of a lawyer who presented an appeal in which he cited non-existent case law and official reports allegedly generated by artificial intelligence tools.
A few days ago, the Criminal Chamber notified the sentence confirming the acquittal of a resident of Tenerife who was tried in July 2025 for an alleged crime of sexual assault before the Second Section of the Provincial Court of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. As reported by the TSJC in a press release, the judgment rejected the appeal of the private prosecution against the acquittal and the court detected that the lawyer of this party had included in his appeal various citations of allegedly “fallacious” or “apocryphal” jurisprudence.
In addition, the Chamber found a reference to a report by the General Council of the Judiciary on the credibility of children’s testimonies, the existence of which it was also unaware of. In the opinion of the court, such findings “seem to highlight behavior which reveals the obvious negligence of someone who, considered an expert in procedural rules and respectful of the ethical principles of his profession, entrusted his work without further examination to what the algorithm proposed”.
Likewise, he adds that he would have done so “by failing to diligently verify the existence of what he cited, perhaps hoping that the abundance of references would not only pass unnoticed by this Court, but would also lend authority to his assertions (probably of the same quality as the citations).”
“Very free legal creativity”
The TSJC indicated that the regulations invoked refer to a possible offense due to the violation of the rules of procedural good faith, which may result in a fine if it is determined that the professional acted in bad faith or lacked the respect due to the Court, without prejudice, in addition, to the transfer of the facts to the respective professional association in case the imposition of a certain type of disciplinary sanction could take place.
However, the Court indicates in the judgment that in the appeal presented by the lawyer, the citation of at least seven judgments of the Supreme Court “unrelated to what this Chamber was able to verify in the available databases” was detected. He also claims that in the text there were “many others of the same nature” which “also constitute an exercise in very free legal creativity”, adding that the lawyer “relates” them throughout his writing “with ease and confidence”.
The resolution emphasizes that the Court “is also not aware that there is a report from the General Council of the Judicial Power on the credibility of the testimony of a child from 2019” from which a passage is also extracted in the appeal “with the precision of someone who copies an original which rests on their desk or extracts it from a computer file”. Finally, the court understood that the fault accused of the professional, “far from consisting of a simple slip of the tongue or a venial error, due to its repetition, deserves to be purged”.
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