Can I Use ChatGPT to Defend Myself Against a Criminal Charge?

ChatGPT can do some impressive things. Defending you against a criminal charge should not be one of them.

If you've been charged with a crime, you may be tempted to type the allegations into ChatGPT, ask what your defenses are, and start planning your own case. You might even get an answer that sounds pretty good.

That's the problem: sounding right and being right are very different things when your freedom is at stake.

Criminal defense isn't simply knowing what the law says. It's understanding how that law actually operates in a particular courtroom, before a particular judge, with a particular prosecutor, based on the particular evidence in your case.

I've spent years representing people accused of crimes in Maine. When I evaluate a case, I'm not just reading a police report and identifying legal issues. I'm evaluating witnesses, looking for inconsistencies, examining how the investigation was conducted, considering what evidence may be suppressed, and thinking about how twelve actual jurors might react to the evidence.

AI doesn't replace that experience or judgment.

There is another problem: ChatGPT only knows what you tell it. Clients frequently don't recognize which facts are legally important. Sometimes the seemingly insignificant detail is the one that changes my entire analysis of a case.

And you should be extremely careful about putting confidential or sensitive information about a pending criminal case into any online service.

Can ChatGPT help you understand what a legal term means or give you general information about the criminal justice system? Sure.

Should you trust it to defend you against the State of Maine?

Absolutely not.

If you've been charged with a crime, don't try to become your own criminal defense lawyer with the help of artificial intelligence.

Talk to a real one. Talk to me.