Fake AI-invented court cases were used to justify banning a prisoner from speaking to media
Tasmania's Parole Board cited court decisions that didn't exist to silence a woman who says she was wrongly convicted of murder — the cases were AI hallucinations.
What happened: Susan Neill-Fraser was convicted in 2010 of murdering her partner, Bob Chappell, aboard their yacht on Tasmania's Derwent River. She has always maintained her innocence and was released on parole in 2022. After she asked to discuss her case publicly, Tasmania's Parole Board tightened her conditions, eventually banning her from claiming innocence in any media, including podcasts or social media. In September, the Tasmania Supreme Court heard that a document from the board's secretary, used to justify the harsher conditions, cited a string of court decisions that turned out not to exist. They were AI hallucinations. The media ban was then dropped.
Why it matters: Breaching parole could have sent Neill-Fraser back to prison for up to seven more years, over a condition built partly on fabricated legal citations. Human rights lawyer Sarah Schwartz says parole decisions get little scrutiny or right of court challenge, which makes them especially exposed to unnoticed AI errors and weak decision-making generally. She points to Kathleen Folbigg, wrongly jailed for 20 years, whose eventual exoneration relied heavily on public and media advocacy — the very kind of speech Neill-Fraser was being blocked from.
How it works, plainly: AI hallucinations happen when a language model produces text that sounds authoritative but is factually wrong or invented outright. These tools work by predicting statistically likely next words from training data, not by checking facts, so they have no built-in way to know true from false. Hallucinations get worse on obscure or narrow topics, like specific case law, and cannot be fully eliminated, only reduced with more data or added web-search checks. Nothing in the process stops confidently wrong citations from being written into official documents unless a human independently verifies them.
The rollout: Tasmania's attorney general, Guy Barnett, called the episode "not acceptable" and said he would seek an explanation from the Parole Board's chair. No broader inquiry into how AI is used across the state's justice system has been announced yet. Neill-Fraser says she will keep pushing to clear her name and highlight wrongful convictions generally, with Griffith University's Innocence Project now examining her case for fresh appeal grounds. Police maintain their investigation was sound and note multiple courts have upheld the conviction.