Pennington v. First Hand Land, LLC

Issue

What sanction is appropriate when a party to a civil appeal files a fabricated court order as a standalone ground for relief, and does the ease of making convincing forgeries with artificial intelligence change how courts should respond?

Rule

Rule 38 of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals authorizes appropriate sanctions, including dismissal of the appeal, against a party who files a petition or motion that is frivolous or interposed for an improper purpose. In Pennington the court for the first time adopted for Rule 38 the standard it applies to Superior Court dismissals for misconduct under Breezevale Ltd. v. Dickinson: dismissal may be warranted where a party has willfully deceived the court and engaged in conduct utterly inconsistent with the orderly administration of justice. Dismissal remains an extreme sanction to be granted sparingly. The forgery itself was established on judicially noticeable facts, the court relying on Christopher v. Aguigui for the proposition that it may take judicial notice of another court's order and docket.

Application

Danielle Pennington lost her home to a 2019 foreclosure and appealed the writ of restitution that allowed First Hand Land, LLC to evict her. The District of Columbia Court of Appeals denied an injunction pending appeal on May 22, 2025, and she was evicted the next day. A week later she moved for reconsideration, attaching what she presented as a March 24, 2025 quiet title order from United States District Judge Reggie B. Walton declaring her the lawful owner of the property free and clear of liens. First Hand answered that the order was forged. The Superior Court in a parallel action had already found the same document fraudulent and clearly false on its face for four reasons: it appeared nowhere on the district court docket, it postdated by four days the district court's March 20, 2025 dismissal of her case, its clerk's attestation carried an electronic date stamp of July 30, 2024, about eight months before the date in the text of the order and a month before the district court proceedings began, and Pennington had recorded the same document with the District's recorder of deeds. The Court of Appeals added three more discrepancies of its own: the signature block said Judge Walton was sitting by designation in the bankruptcy court when he was in fact acting as a district judge, the electronic date stamp matched to the second a show cause order issued by the bankruptcy court on July 30, 2024 at 12:31:22 and carried that bankruptcy case number, and Pennington had appealed Judge Walton's dismissal on April 7, 2025, which would make no sense had he ruled in her favor. Ordered to show cause, Pennington asserted only that the accusations of fraud were legally unsustainable; she offered no innocent explanation, did not dispute the document's absence from the docket, and could not explain the date discrepancy. Turning to sanction, the court explained why nothing short of dismissal would do. Professional discipline was unavailable because Pennington is not a member of the bar. Monetary sanctions were a poor fit because she has proceeded in forma pauperis since September 2024 and describes herself as homeless, and in any event a litigant able to pay should not be able to buy a license to defraud the court. Simply disregarding the forged order would leave her no worse off than if she had never forged it, which the court said would be no deterrent at all. Her pro se status earned some latitude for missteps but not for this one. In a closing footnote the court was careful about what it was not saying: Pennington's forgery bore no hallmarks of artificial intelligence, but AI has made convincing forgeries quick and easy to produce, and courts must look for them.

Conclusion

The District of Columbia Court of Appeals dismissed both the appeal and Pennington's pending motions as a sanction for her litigation misconduct, adopting the Breezevale standard for Rule 38 dismissals in the process. The court expressly did not resolve whether it must consider less severe sanctions before dismissing an appeal, as the Superior Court is sometimes required to do, holding instead that on these facts no lesser sanction would suffice. The panel did not find that artificial intelligence produced the document; it said the opposite, and its AI discussion is an explicit aside about what is coming.

Pennington has submitted a blatantly forged court order to this court, which she has pressed as a standalone basis for ruling in her favor. Moreover, she has not acknowledged her misconduct, explained it, or expressed any contrition once pressed on it.

Judge Deahl for the panel, explaining why the misconduct was extreme

That would serve as no deterrent at all to litigants falsifying evidence if the worst that could happen is they get caught and it gets discounted.

Judge Deahl, rejecting exclusion of the forged order as a sufficient sanction

While Pennington's forgery does not bear any hallmarks of being generated with artificial intelligence, we note that recent advancements in AI have made it increasingly quick and easy for parties to create convincing forgeries.

Judge Deahl, footnote 1, expressly declining to attribute this forgery to AI

Why it matters. Pennington gives litigants a citable appellate answer to the fabricated-document problem: the fabrication is proved by docket comparison and internal metadata inconsistencies, not by expert testimony, and the remedy is termination rather than exclusion, because exclusion alone deters nothing. The court volunteers, in a footnote, that AI forgeries are the next version of this problem while stressing that this particular forgery was not one.

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This summary was written from the opinion itself. Every quotation above was located in the text of the decision it is attributed to. It is a summary for public education and is not legal advice.

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