District Judge Monica Trujillo sanctioned criminal defense attorney Dean Kajioka $500 on Wednesday after saying AI was misused in a filing he submitted in the Piero’s Italian Cuisine bombing case. She also struck the document at issue and ordered the payment to the Clark County library.
The filing involved Robert Schwieger, 53, who was arrested in April and faces a count each of conspiracy to commit first-degree arson, first-degree arson and using explosives to damage, destroy, attempt or conspire to damage or destroy property. The sanction lands directly on the work product tied to that defense filing, not on the criminal counts themselves.
Monica Trujillo’s order
Trujillo said, “AI was misused.” The judge’s ruling turned on a reply that prosecutors said differed significantly in style, tone and formatting from Kajioka’s original petition for writ of habeas corpus filed June 22.
The June 22 filing asked for dismissal of the indictment against Schwieger. Prosecutors filed their opposition on July 7, then pointed to the reply they said carried a hallucinated citation to a non-existent case: “Evans v. State, 123 Nev. 117, 159 P.3d 438.”
Dean Kajioka’s response
Kajioka told the court the citation error was “just a typo,” and said the case existed under a different citation: 944 P.2d 253. He also told the court, “I find it highly offensive and professionally questionable that my integrity is at question here.”
That dispute matters because the sanction did not rest on a broad policy debate about AI. It rested on whether the filing contained a citation error from ordinary mistake or from machine-generated text that was not checked before it reached the court.
Eckley Keach’s warning
Chief Deputy District Attorney Eckley Keach said, “Unguarded use of AI is an existential threat to the practice of law and the fair administration of justice.” He also said, “AI will never understand the human cost of a criminal case, not to a defendant, not to the victims of crime.”
Keach said the citation could only have been an AI hallucination. The court’s response left Kajioka with a $500 sanction and a stricken filing, while the underlying criminal case remains tied to Schwieger and the April arrest that brought him into court in the first place.
What comes next is limited to that record: the penalty stands, the filing is out, and the disputed citation now sits at the center of how the court viewed the brief.
