Hannah Payne gets chance for retrial because of AI citations, Georgia Supreme Court rules
A Georgia woman sentenced to life in prison will have the chance for a new trial after the state Supreme Court sanctioned the prosecutor connected with her previous case.
In May 2019, authorities say Hannah Payne witnessed a crash between a car driven by 62-year-old Kenneth Herring and another vehicle. When Herring tried to leave the scene, Payne followed him and blocked his path with her car. An altercation between the two ended with Payne shooting Herring in the stomach, killing him, police said.
Payne had called 911 during the incident and was told by dispatchers not to follow or engage the hit-and-run driver. But she ignored those instructions.
In 2023, a Clayton County jury found Payne guilty of felony murder, malice murder, and other charges. She was sentenced to life without parole plus 13 years.
Following the sentencing, Payne and her attorney filed a motion for a new trial. It was then that Justice Benjamin A. Land said that Deborah Leslie, the assistant district attorney assigned to the case, "filed a brief that contained non-existent cases and cases that do not stand for the proposition asserted in the brief."
Land writes that the trial court denied Payne's motion, citing the non-existent cases. The state's appellate brief filed by Leslie also appeared to cite cases that "do not stand for the proposition asserted."
The opinion states that Leslie admitted to using artificial intelligence software to draft the briefs, acknowledging that the citations were not verified before they were submitted to the court.
"While we have no rule against the responsible use of artificial intelligence software by attorneys, citing cases that do not exist or do not support the proposition for which they are cited is a violation of this Court's rules and falls far beneath the conduct we expect from Georgia lawyers," the justice wrote in his opinion.
Because of the citations, the high court vacated the previous ruling denying Payne's motion, sending it back to the lower court for reassessment without any misattributions.
As part of the ruling, the justices have suspended Leslie's privilege to practice before the Georgia Supreme Court for six months and set a condition that she complete an additional 12 hours of continuing legal education on ethics, brief writing, and use of artificial intelligence in the legal system.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.