Thomas v. Pangburn

What sanction did the court impose?

Magistrate Judge Ray recommended dismissal of the Amended Complaint as a Rule 11(b) sanction, in addition to dismissal on judicial-immunity grounds. The court declined monetary sanctions, noting that Plaintiff had paid the $402 filing fee and that monetary sanctions "would have severe personal consequences" (citing Doc. 38). The court warned Plaintiff that "future filings relying on similar frivolous sovereign citizen theory could lead to Rule 11 sanctions." Plaintiff's separate sovereign-citizen-style arguments were not separately sanctioned because Rule 11(c)(1) requires notice and opportunity to respond.

Why does Thomas v. Pangburn matter for law firms using AI?

Thomas v. Pangburn is the earliest Southern District of Georgia case where a pro se litigant’s filings were sanctioned under Rule 11 for fabricated citations that the court inferred came from generative AI even though Plaintiff never named a tool. Magistrate Judge Christopher L. Ray’s October 6, 2023 Report and Recommendation predates most of the 2024-2026 sanctions wave and reads as a careful application of Rule 11 procedure to a fact pattern the court framed as new.

The procedural sequence is the part most worth carrying forward. Defendant’s counsel reported being unable to locate many of Plaintiff’s cited cases. The court reviewed the briefing and identified ten citations that did not exist but conformed to expected Bluebook conventions. The court issued a Rule 11(c)(3) show-cause order (Doc. 15) demanding an explanation; Plaintiff apologized but did not explain the origin (Doc. 16). The court then directed Plaintiff to “explain how the erroneous citations identified in the Court’s prior Order came to appear in his submissions” (Doc. 17). After a sua sponte deadline extension, Plaintiff responded that “the citations in question were included due to an unfortunate error on [his] part” and that he “relied on research [he] conducted by [him]self” (Doc. 47). He did not identify the source.

The court treated the non-answer as load-bearing evidence of bad faith. Citing Mata v. Avianca, the R&R concluded that “many harms flow from the submission of fake opinions” and that the combination of fabricated citations and an evasive response to a court order satisfied the bad-faith standard for inherent-power sanctions. Dismissal under Rule 11(b) followed as a stand-alone sanction, layered on top of the merits dismissal under judicial immunity. The court declined monetary sanctions on the record-based finding that Plaintiff had already paid the $402 filing fee and disclosed in earlier briefing that monetary sanctions “would have severe personal consequences.”

Two procedural notes are useful for firms reading this for representation-side guidance. First, the court separately considered whether Plaintiff’s underlying sovereign-citizen-style arguments warranted independent sanctions and declined to sanction on those grounds, citing Rule 11(c)(1)‘s notice-and-opportunity-to-respond requirement: the show-cause order had been directed at the citations, not at the legal theory. Second, the court explicitly contemplated that Plaintiff might appear before it again and framed the dismissal as deterrence: “It hopes that if Plaintiff should ever appear before this Court again, he will draw on this experience to avoid any future sanctions.” The dismissal-as-deterrent framing is structurally similar to later disclosure-and-certification orders such as the Cannon order in Quezaire v. TechniPower (N.D. Ga. 2025), where the disclosure regime is itself the sanction.

For a managing partner in Georgia, the load-bearing lesson is that a court does not need an admission of AI use to sanction. The Pangburn court inferred fabrication from the citation pattern alone, then treated Plaintiff’s refusal to identify the source as independent bad faith. A firm that asks a court to find Rule 11 fabrication does not have to prove which tool generated the cites; a pattern of fabrications conforming to expected citation conventions, combined with an evasive response to a show-cause order, suffices.