District Judge Monica Trujillo struck a defense filing and ordered $500 in sanctions after saying AI was misused in a brief filed for Robert Schwieger, one of several defendants accused in the bombing of Piero’s Italian Cuisine. The penalty, payable to the Clark County library, came on Wednesday in Las Vegas.
The filing at issue was a petition for writ of habeas corpus Dean Kajioka submitted on June 22, seeking dismissal of Schwieger’s indictment. Kajioka later replied to prosecutors, but they told the court on July 7 that the response looked different in style, tone and formatting from the original petition and included a citation to Evans v. State, 123 Nev. 117, 159 P.3d 438, a case they said does not exist.
That mattered because the court was not looking at a harmless drafting mistake in the abstract. Schwieger 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 bombing damaged only the restaurant entrance, but the case has now become a test of how far a judge will go when a criminal defense attorney’s filing appears to have been shaped by AI.
Kajioka pushed back, saying the citation error was only a typo and that the case existed under a different citation, 944 P.2d 253. He said he found the challenge to his integrity offensive and professionally questionable, and he pointed to more than 30 years of practice in the court. The dispute is about more than one wrong citation: prosecutors framed the reply as a document whose language and structure did not match the petition it was supposed to answer, while the defense said the error was clerical.
The sanction leaves the court’s message plain. In this case, Judge Trujillo accepted the prosecutors’ view that the filing crossed a line, and she made the cost immediate. What remains unanswered is whether the AI use was limited to a single brief or whether more filings in the bombing case will face the same scrutiny as the court continues through Schwieger’s challenge to the indictment.
