The High Court of England and Wales dismissed a judicial review of the Crown Prosecution Service’s (CPS) decision to continue a child’s prosecution, despite a record citing a nonexistent Court of Appeal case three times.
The Divisional Court handed down its judgment Thursday, Oct. 29, after a hearing Oct. 20. Senior Crown Prosecutor Ravinder Dhillon decided to continue the prosecution on April 21, 2026, and a chief crown prosecutor confirmed the decision April 27, the ruling says.
The record cited “CPS – R v J [2024] EWCA Crim 3529.” The parties agreed that case did not exist. In an Oct. 15 witness statement, Dhillon said she had made an error and meant to cite R v JTB [2009] UKHL 20. The judges, Lord Justice Holgate and Mr Justice Wall, called her explanation for relying on the nonexistent case “unsatisfactory,” but said it did not affect the judicial review’s outcome.
The court refused an amendment that would have added a proposed ground disputing legal propositions attributed to the false citation, finding the ground unarguable. It granted permission to apply for judicial review on grounds one and two, then dismissed the application. The case concerns the alleged rape of a seven-year-old girl by her 11-year-old brother; the court ordered the children to remain anonymous.
The judgment does not mention AI. The Guardian reported Tuesday that an internet search may have returned an AI-generated summary containing the reference. The CPS told The Guardian that the error arose during internet legal research, was corrected and prompted an internal review. A spokesperson said a lesson from the review was to use trusted sources for case law.
The CPS’s AI vision, published in June 2025, says an appropriately qualified and trained person should check AI outputs and assigns responsibility for each use and output to an individual. Brian Flanagan, an associate professor of law at Maynooth University, told The Guardian that AI’s time-saving potential can raise the risk of fabricated legal authorities being used without adequate checks. The Guardian described this as the second known CPS case involving nonexistent legal authorities potentially linked to AI, after an extradition appeal involving two Romanian nationals.
The judgment listed a youth court trial for Friday, Nov. 6.
