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Florida · state appellate court · 2025

Clerk of Circuit Court and Comptroller, Hillsborough County v. Rangel, State of Florida

District Court of Appeal of Florida, 29 August 2025. What the court wrote about citations that did not exist, in its own words, from the document on file.

Case record · Fla. Dist. Ct. App.

  1. Court. District Court of Appeal of FloridaCOURT
  2. Level. state appellate courtLEVEL
  3. Date. 29 August 2025DATED
  4. Docket. No. 2D2024-1772DOCKET
  5. Documents. one document, 5 passages quoted belowON FILE
  6. Source. CourtListenerSOURCE

Retrieved · the text below was read from the source documents on that day.

What the court wrote

The passages in which the court addresses the fabricated authority, verbatim, by document. A bracketed ellipsis marks where a passage was cut for length; nothing else is changed.

Published opinion, 29 August 2025 · source · PDF · 6 pages

In response to our order, Mr. Lopez, through his own counsel, admitted that he included "non-existent authority and fictitious quotation blocks within the answer brief." He stated that he "acknowledges his grave errors, accepts full responsibility, and apologizes to this Court, the Appellant, and opposing counsel." Mr. Lopez explained that he was handling this appeal pro bono and that as he began preparing the brief, he recognized that he lacked experience in appellate law.

He admitted that he "did not review the authority cited within the draft answer brief prior to filing." He added "that had he attempted to review the authority prior to filing, he would have easily discovered the fictitious block quotations and non-existent case." Although the appellant's reply brief was filed on April 24, 2025, Mr.

Lopez admitted that one case cited in the answer brief is non-existent, fourteen of the cited cases do not contain quotations attributed to them in the brief, many of the cases were inaccurately summarized, and the answer brief misstated court holdings in nine of the cited cases.

3d 1185, 1187-88 (Fla. 3d DCA 2024) (imposing sanctions on a pro se litigant for failing to comply with Florida Rule of Appellate Procedure 9.210(b) and for submitting a brief that included "fictitious case law"); ByoPlanet Int'l, LLC v. Johansson, No.

Fla. May 20, 2025) (concluding that sanctions were appropriate when attorneys submitted a written response containing "a fake hallucinated case citation which allegedly supported a principle of law for which they were advocating"). 6 As outlined previously, Mr.

What the text mentions

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Where this fits

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More from District Court of Appeal of Florida, from Florida, or from 2025. The whole record is at court decisions on AI-hallucinated citations.

Every case in this record shares one cause: a citation reached a court without anyone opening it. What a citation gate is explains the mechanism that makes that impossible by construction; how to check an AI citation in five minutes is the manual version; the sanctions record is the essay this table grew out of.

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