Hampton v. Lofton: Arizona Court Flags “Hallucinated Findings” Cited by Pro Se Appellant in Custody Dispute | Advocate Prakhar

Case at a Glance

Background

Tyrone Lofton (Father) and Courtney Hampton (Mother) divorced in 2013, with Mother designated as primary residential parent of their child (born 2010) and Father receiving regular parenting time. In 2022, following Mother’s petition, the court modified the arrangement to give Mother “final say” on decisions where parents could not agree. Father did not appeal.

In 2024, the parties’ troubled co-parenting relationship escalated when the child assaulted Father, triggering separate modification petitions from both parents. After a May 2025 evidentiary hearing, the court denied both petitions, finding that both parents contributed to the dysfunction and that Father’s expert witness lacked credibility — the witness had never met the child or mother, relied entirely on Father’s account, and used unclear methodology.

Father appealed. His opening brief argued that the trial court’s findings were “internally inconsistent and contrary to the record.” To support this argument, he identified a series of specific findings he attributed to the trial court’s order. The Court of Appeals reviewed the actual order. None of the four findings appeared in it.

The AI Issue

The Court of Appeals’ description is unprecedented in its directness: “Father identifies some of the court’s findings he takes issue with. But those findings do not appear in the court’s order. For example, on pages 16 through 18 of Father’s opening brief he identifies the following hallucinated findings.” The court then lists them: that the child showed “persistent hostility toward Father” and had “difficulty adjusting to custodial transitions”; that Father’s expert’s explanations were “speculative”; that Father’s evidence was “self-serving” and “limited in scope”; and that Mother was “evasive and inconsistent.” The court confirms that the trial court made none of these findings. Father, using AI assistance, had submitted to the Court of Appeals a description of his own case’s factual record that AI had invented.

What the Court Decided

• Trial court’s denial of Father’s modification petition affirmed: court found a change in circumstances but no change to custody was in the child’s best interests.
• Father’s challenge to rejection of his expert witness dismissed: credibility determinations are within the trial court’s discretion and cannot be reweighed on appeal.
• “Hallucinated findings” argument rejected: the cited findings do not appear in the trial court’s order; Father’s argument therefore has no factual foundation.
• Father’s belated Nicaise argument (challenging the “final say” order) dismissed as waived: he never appealed the 2022 order and did not raise Nicaise at the trial court level.
• Evidentiary challenge (documents not timely disclosed) dismissed: no abuse of discretion shown.

“Father identifies some of the court’s findings he takes issue with. But those findings do not appear in the court’s order… he identifies the following hallucinated findings.”

— Arizona Court of Appeals, Division One, March 31, 2026

The India Angle

Indian Law Equivalent

In Indian family law appeals, the factual record is governed by the trial court’s written judgment and the evidence on record. Under Order XLI of the CPC, an appellate court in an appeal from a decree may, in a proper case, take additional evidence or require evidence to be taken. However, fabricating findings that the trial court never made would constitute a misrepresentation of the record — analogous to filing a forged document, which is an offence under Section 463 of the Indian Penal Code. In custody matters under the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, the Guardians and Wards Act, 1890, or the Special Marriage Act, 1954, the “welfare of the child” is the paramount consideration — and an appellate record that misrepresents the trial court’s findings undermines the appellate court’s ability to assess whether that paramount consideration was properly applied.

Bar Council Rules

Rule 49 of the BCI Rules prohibits misstatements of fact to courts. Attributing to a trial court findings it never made is a factual misrepresentation, not a legal one — but it is equally prohibited. In an appeal, the factual record is the foundation of everything; fabricating elements of that record is a more fundamental dishonesty than citing a non-existent case. Indian High Courts have the authority to initiate contempt proceedings against advocates who misrepresent the lower court record.

Practical Advice for Indian Advocates

• When using AI to draft appellate grounds, always verify each factual assertion against the actual text of the lower court order and the trial court record — AI will confabulate findings that fit the narrative the litigant has described without having seen the actual order.
• Custody appeals are particularly susceptible to this error: the AI generates “findings” consistent with the client’s account of events, which may differ significantly from what the judge actually wrote.
• Before finalising any appellate brief, conduct a fact-check: for every factual claim about what the lower court found, locate the exact paragraph in the lower court’s order — if the finding isn’t there, the claim cannot be made.

Quick Takeaways

• AI hallucinations now extend beyond fabricated case citations to fabricated judicial findings — the factual record of the appeal itself can be distorted.
• Arizona courts now use “hallucinated findings” as a term of art in published decisions — the stigma associated with AI hallucinations is becoming part of the permanent legal record.
• Appellate arguments built on non-existent trial court findings have no foundation — the entire argument collapses when the court reads the actual order.

Deep Dive: AI and the Factual Record — A New Dimension of Hallucination Risk

The Hampton v. Lofton ruling is a watershed moment in AI-hallucination jurisprudence because it extends the phenomenon from the legal authority (case citations) to the factual record (what the trial court actually found). This is a qualitatively different kind of error. A hallucinated case citation deceives the court about what the law says. A hallucinated judicial finding deceives the court about what already happened — about the factual history of the specific case now before it.

How does this happen? When a litigant describes their case to an AI tool and asks it to help draft grounds of appeal, the AI generates appellate arguments based on the narrative the litigant provides. If the litigant says “the judge found my evidence credible” or “the judge said the child was hostile to me,” the AI will incorporate these assertions into appellate language — attributing them to the trial court’s findings. If the trial court actually said something quite different, or said nothing at all on those points, the AI’s text will still sound authoritative and be formatted to look like a quotation or reference to the court’s order.

The solution is straightforward but requires discipline: every appellate brief must be fact-checked against the lower court’s actual order before filing. This means reading the order, paragraph by paragraph, and confirming that every factual statement in the brief about what the lower court found appears somewhere in the order. This is the appellate equivalent of reading every case you cite — and it is the step that AI-assisted litigants most commonly skip.

For family law cases in India and elsewhere, this verification obligation is particularly important because custody orders often contain extensive factual findings about the parties’ character, conduct, and fitness as parents. A litigant who asks AI to draft an appeal challenging those findings will receive a brief that attributes things to the order that may never have been written — and those fabricated attributions will be evident to the appellate court, which has the order in front of it. The result, as in Hampton v. Lofton, is an appeal that is fundamentally defective before it begins.