1. The Crime Scene (The Symptom)
During an internal evaluation run, a standard RAG pipeline drafting a § 1983 qualified-immunity section cited a Ninth Circuit opinion for a binding rule in the Second Circuit. The case exists; the jurisdiction assignment is wrong. The failure was caught pre-filing — but would have passed a citation-existence-only linter.
Sandbox capture of a common production failure: correct case, wrong circuit, presented as controlling authority.
2. The Artifact (Raw LLM Output)
"Qualified immunity analysis in the Second Circuit follows the framework set forth
in Lange v. California, 141 S. Ct. 2011 (2021), as applied in Johnson v. City of
Seattle, 994 F.3d 874 (9th Cir. 2021), which the Second Circuit adopted as
binding precedent for excessive-force claims at the motion-to-dismiss stage."
"See also District of Columbia v. Wesby, 583 U.S. 48 (2018) (extending Ninth Circuit
notice pleading standards to Second Circuit § 1983 actions)."
3. The Evidence Breakdown (The Core Contradiction)
Claimed Authority: Johnson v. City of Seattle, 994 F.3d 874 (9th Cir. 2021).
The Reality Check: Opinion exists in the Ninth Circuit. It is not binding in the Second Circuit and has not been "adopted" as such. The LLM collapsed geographic jurisdiction boundaries.
Claimed Authority: District of Columbia v. Wesby, 583 U.S. 48 (2018).
The Reality Check: Wesby is a Supreme Court opinion on probable cause in § 1983 qualified-immunity context — but does not "extend Ninth Circuit notice pleading standards" to the Second Circuit. Jurisdictional and doctrinal layers are both corrupted.
Pattern: RAG retrieved geographically proximate chunks from the wrong circuit's corpus. No fabrication — but the assembled brief would misstate controlling law.
4. The Dali Verification Check
Dali jurisdictional audit: circuit_mismatch — cited Ninth Circuit authority for Second Circuit binding proposition. Internal eval flagged before export; logged here as ground-truth training data for the failure database.