Supreme Court of Ohio Glitch: Ruling Cites Case That Doesn't Exist for 15 Years
COLUMBUS, OH — A routine data audit has unearthed a bizarre anomaly in the Ohio judicial system: a 2023 Supreme Court of Ohio ruling explicitly references a precedent-setting case from 2009 that, according to all official records, was never filed, docketed, or heard. Technical analysts call it a “ghost citation” — a legal glitch in the matrix where a judge’s opinion quotes a non-existent decision, complete with a fake case number. The phantom case, titled “State v. M.E.T.A.,” was said to address AI liability in self-driving car crashes, a topic that was barely a sci-fi fantasy in 2009. The error has forced a rehearing of a real property dispute, as lawyers scramble to untangle whether this is a clerical mistake, a corrupted database entry, or something far stranger hidden in the machine.