Commonwealth v. Butler (Pa. Super. Ct.)

What happened

Commonwealth v. Butler is a criminal sentencing appeal. Percy Butler pleaded guilty in the Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas to drug, firearms, conspiracy and receiving stolen property charges and received an aggregate sentence of ten to twenty years. His counsel moved for reconsideration, arguing that the offenses formed one common scheme that warranted concurrent or mitigated sentences.

The reconsideration motion presented what it represented as direct quotations from six decisions of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania and the Superior Court. The quoted language does not appear in any of them. A seventh citation, Commonwealth v. Kelley, 569 A.2d 385 (Pa. Super. Ct. 1990), names a case that does not exist; the reporter page corresponds to a Commonwealth Court workers' compensation opinion. After the motion was denied, counsel filed an appellate brief on March 23 that repeated the same seven quotations.

On April 14 counsel applied to file an amended brief, describing "a few mistakes" involving "incorrect factual summaries" and attributing them to human error. The prosecution answered on April 22 contesting those assertions. On May 11 the court struck the original brief, allowed an amended one, and cautioned that "presenting fabricated and/or false cases to the [C]ourt may result in sanctions." Counsel filed the amended brief that day.

What the court did

Writing for the panel in the opinion, Judge Sullivan found the discretionary sentencing claim waived because it did not present a substantial question, and affirmed. The panel then addressed counsel's conduct separately, identifying ethical concerns with the reconsideration motion, the first brief, the application to amend and the amended brief. It wrote that it could not "chalk off the wholesale invention of one case and a direct quotation from that hallucinated case, and the false, direct, material quotations from six others as the product of 'human error.'"

The opinion made no finding that generative AI was used. A footnote states that the panel "cannot say with certainty that Counsel used GenAI" but that no alternative explanation readily suggested itself. The panel cited Rule 3.3 of the Pennsylvania Rules of Professional Conduct on candor toward the tribunal and its own earlier decisions in Saber v. Navy Federal Credit Union and Kaspryak v. Stadarskyy. It also found that citations in the amended brief to Walls, Caldwell and Pettersen did not support the propositions for which they were offered.

The disposition in Commonwealth v. Butler was to affirm the judgment of sentence and "remind Counsel of his ethical obligations to the courts of Pennsylvania in any subsequent case in which he appears." No monetary sanction or referral was ordered.

Where it stands

The Butler opinion was filed October 19 at No. 3321 EDA 2025 and designated for publication as 2026 PA Super 232. Whether Butler has sought allowance of appeal in the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, and whether any disciplinary authority has opened a matter concerning counsel, were not located as of October 30. The opinion does not name counsel, and this record follows it.

The obligation it engaged

Commonwealth v. Butler engages Clause 3 of the Standard, independent authority, at its most basic. Language was placed in quotation marks and attributed to named decisions without being confirmed against those decisions. The same seven quotations then moved unchanged from the trial court motion to the appellate brief, so an unverified document became the source for a second one. Clause 4, checkability before adoption, would have stopped that carryover, because a quotation with a reporter citation is among the easiest outputs to check.

Clause 7, contemporaneous record, explains why the application to amend drew the panel's criticism. Counsel attributed the problem to human error without saying how the errors occurred, and the panel wrote that the attribution "fails entirely to explain" them. An expert asked how a false quotation entered a report should be able to answer from a dated record of the sources consulted and the tools used. A general description of the process, offered after the fact, is the answer this panel declined to accept.

Sources

• Superior Court of Pennsylvania (copy hosted by the AI Hallucination Cases database, Damien Charlotin) · October 19, 2026
  Commonwealth v. Butler, 2026 PA Super 232, No. 3321 EDA 2025, opinion

What could not be confirmed

The court did not find that generative AI was used. The opinion does not name defense counsel. The hosting database labels the matter as a Supreme Court of Pennsylvania decision; the opinion itself is from the Superior Court and is followed here. The Unified Judicial System's own copy was not opened. Any petition for allowance of appeal or disciplinary action was not located as of October 30, 2026.