A man accused in the 2024 killing of a Warren mail carrier told a federal judge that he wants to keep his defense attorney, even though the lawyer was recently sanctioned for using fabricated artificial intelligence described in a court document as “hallucinations” in a previous case.
Kaprise Sledge, 25, appeared before U.S. District Judge Donald C. Nugent for a pretrial hearing. During the proceeding, Nugent addressed a March 20 decision from the 11th District Court of Appeals regarding Sledge’s attorney, William Norman.
The appellate court recently imposed a comprehensive suite of sanctions against Norman after finding he submitted a legal filing containing entirely fabricated transcript quotations generated by ChatGPT. The court determined the lawyer failed to verify the AI-generated content, which ascribed inflammatory statements to a prosecutor that were never uttered.
Judge Nugent ensured Sledge understood the details of the appellate court’s findings—including that Norman had “doubled down” on the false narrative by appealing to the Ohio Supreme Court without correcting the record. Sledge confirmed he was fully advised of these issues and told the judge he had personally hired Norman and wished for him to remain on the case.
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