Former Trump Fixer Michael Cohen has behaved admirably throughout his supervised release — staying out of trouble and dutifully providing testimony against his old boss — and his legal team thought this might be an excellent time to seek to terminate the arrangement. Cohen’s attorney, David M. Schwartz of Gerstman Schwartz, filed a letter motion outlining three exemplary cases where the Second Circuit upheld a modification of the supervised release arrangement.
As far as the Court can tell, none of these cases exist.
It reads precisely like how ChatGPT composes answers to the query:
“Are there Second Circuit cases where the court found that the district court had not abused its discretion in granting early termination and that the defendant had met the burden of demonstrating that he was no longer a danger to the community?”
But it’s also terrible drafting in any case. A cursory review of the letter before sending it out the door should have, at the very least, resulted in adding some variety to this boilerplate or, better yet, using the language once to apply to all three. As is, the clunky, repeated passage just underscores how little time and effort went into this letter.
The results of the lawyer’s research have all the hallmarks of a hallucinating AI search using an off-the-rack product like ChatGPT instead of one specifically tailored to provide legal results. Given the coverage surrounding the first time this happened in New York, it’s stunning that any lawyer would return to that well.
Source: Above the law
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