In June 2025, the Crown Prosecution Service placed two nonexistent cases into formal submissions for extradition appeals. The same false authorities then appeared in another document. They survived long enough to reach the High Court record before lawyers on both sides tried to locate them and discovered there was nothing to find.

The service later said the citations probably originated from generative AI. It also made the more important admission: the operative failure was human review. Someone filed legal authorities without verifying that the cases existed.

This did not change the outcome of the appeals. It is still a significant vibe-lawyering incident because the institution involved was not a hurried solo practitioner or an anonymous self-represented litigant. It was the national body responsible for prosecuting criminal cases in England and Wales, putting reviewed submissions before a court in proceedings that could send people to another country.

Two authorities that did not exist

The incident was set out in the July 8, 2026 judgment in Andreea-Maria Tobosaru v Court of Law Craiova, Romania, reported as [2026] EWHC 1720 (Admin). The joined appeals challenged decisions to extradite two people to Romania.

Grounds of opposition prepared by the Crown Prosecution Service on June 3, 2025 relied on cases said to support the continuing application of an earlier extradition decision known as Pilecki. Two of the cited authorities were Vlad v Romania [2017] EWHC 2060 (Admin) and Jeziorski v Poland [2019] EWHC 3885 (Admin).

Mr Justice Sweeting's judgment dispensed with any mystery: neither authority exists.

A legal citation is the identifying information that lets readers find a judgment and check what it actually says. In England and Wales, a neutral citation such as [2019] EWHC 3885 (Admin) identifies the year, court, decision number, and division. A fabricated citation borrows that official shape. It looks searchable because it resembles thousands of real judgments.

The two fake cases were not harmless decoration. They were offered as authority for a legal proposition in formal submissions. The court and opposing lawyers were entitled to assume the Crown Prosecution Service had read the cases it asked them to rely on.

The fiction moved into a second document

The erroneous material was carried into another filing dated June 12, 2025 and titled "Respondent Submissions." The judgment noted that the false authorities therefore appeared in more than one document. The error also went unnoticed at the permission stage, even though the material was already before the court.

By February 2, 2026, a later skeleton argument prepared by junior and leading counsel no longer relied on the nonexistent cases. A skeleton argument is a structured written outline of the points a party plans to make at a hearing. Removing the citations prevented them from being used in oral argument, but the new document did not explain that false authorities had appeared earlier.

Lawyers for the appellants could not locate the cases in the usual legal databases. They raised the issue with the prosecution service by email on February 3 and again in a February 5 letter to the court. The service responded the next day, acknowledged the error, apologized, denied any intention to mislead, and began investigating.

A February 9 note from counsel confirmed that the two cases did not exist and apologized for their appearance in both 2025 documents. The matter had reached senior levels inside the prosecution service. That sequence is important because it shows an institutional response eventually working, but only after the verification that should have happened before filing was performed by people trying to challenge the citations.

The first explanation also needed correcting

On March 3, 2026, the Chief Crown Prosecutor gave the court a fuller explanation. The service accepted the citations were inaccurate and said they were likely to have originated through the use of artificial intelligence. It identified the critical failure as the reviewing lawyer not checking the document properly before filing and service.

The letter described generative AI as the likely immediate source and human failure to verify as the operative cause. It said the problem was isolated and not a deliberate effort to mislead.

The Crown Prosecution Service opened an internal review, examined 78 other cases handled by the same lawyer, and found no similar issues. It said the lawyer's other work was of a good standard. The Extradition Unit received reminders about professional duties, internal processes were reviewed, and lessons were circulated more widely. These facts cut against treating the event as evidence that every filing from the service was contaminated.

The March explanation contained another error, however. It proceeded on the basis that instructed counsel had not identified the bad citations before the appellants raised them. After a draft judgment circulated, it emerged that junior counsel had independently been unable to find the authorities and had raised the issue with the service shortly before the appellants did. The service corrected its account in a June 9 letter and apologized again.

That second correction is not equivalent to inventing case law. It does expose the same institutional weakness in miniature: an account presented to the court as the result of an investigation was incomplete and needed another round of checking.

The appeal survived; the review process did not

The false cases were identified before the hearing and had no effect on the argument or judgment. Mr Justice Sweeting dismissed both appeals on their merits and accepted the prosecution service's apology and assurance that nobody intended to mislead the court.

That limitation belongs prominently in the story. The fake authorities did not cause an extradition, reverse one, or alter the legal result. Nobody was sanctioned in the judgment. The court did not describe a sprawling pattern after the service reviewed the other 78 matters.

The absence of those consequences does not reduce the event to a typo. Two official submissions contained authorities shaped like real High Court cases, copied from one document into another, and left unverified through several stages. The process failed at generation, review, reuse, and disclosure. It succeeded only when lawyers stopped trusting the citations and searched for the underlying judgments.

Why this matters more than another lawyer sanction

Most AI-citation stories follow an individual lawyer from fabrication to embarrassment to fine. The penalty often becomes the headline because it supplies a neat number. That framing is less useful here.

The editorial significance is institutional. The Crown Prosecution Service exercises public authority. Its submissions influence criminal and extradition proceedings, and courts rely on it to state the law accurately. An organization with that role should have review processes strong enough to catch fictional authorities regardless of which employee or tool first supplied them.

Focusing on whether one lawyer was punished would miss the better question: how did two invented cases pass through a national prosecution workflow twice? The service's own answer was inadequate checking. Its response, including a 78-case review and wider process reminders, shows that it understood the problem as larger than one person's awkward afternoon.

Public authority requires public verification

The judgment acknowledged that AI may become both common and beneficial in legal work. The failure was using it without the oversight required for legal research. The practical requirement is to open the case, read it, and confirm that its holding supports the sentence being filed.

Courts publish neutral citations so authority can be traced. Legal databases exist so cases can be found. A review process that checks the prose but not the sources is reviewing the least important part of the document.

The Crown Prosecution Service ultimately corrected the record, investigated, apologized twice, and avoided relying on the fiction at the hearing. Those are responsible steps after discovery. An institution with experienced lawyers and formal review still allowed generated case-shaped objects into court documents. Public authority deserves a higher standard than plausible formatting, especially when the paperwork can help decide where a person loses their liberty.