California Supremes deny Scientology petition, won't get involved in Boies Schiller AI debacle

In late June, we told you that the Church of Scientology had petitioned the California Supreme Court over a couple of different issues. One of them was something that we admitted had puzzled us as well: Why the Second Appellate District had not sanctioned Boies Schiller partner John Kucera for admitting that hallucinatory AI-generated citations had showed up in one of his briefs.

But much of the petition was about something entirely different, which we characterized as Scientology “gaslighting” the court about the church’s policy of retaliating against perceived enemies in a fashion known as “Fair Game.”

Scientology claims that no Fair Game policy exists, and it wanted the state supreme court to review the intermediate court’s ruling that the Jane Does who are suing Scientology and Danny Masterson have provided adequate evidence that they were subjected to such a conspiracy of harassment and intimidation.

It was a sort of back-door way of appealing a ruling that Scientology had already lost badly at the intermediate court level.

And now, we’ve learned that the state supreme court wants nothing to do with the case, denying the petition outright, and without explanation.

“That was quick,” our expert TX Lawyer pointed out when he saw the denial listed at the court’s docket.

And he points out, even though the state supreme court is not interested, the Second Appellate District can still rule on the AI blunder.

“On the AI sanctions issue, the intermediate court of appeal never lost jurisdiction. They don’t seem to be in any hurry to rule on the sanctions issue, but it has not gone away,” he says.

The intermediate appeals court has indicated that it was considering sanctions against Kucera for that blunder, but then during oral arguments on March 3 the subject of artificial intelligence didn’t come up, and nothing was said about it in the court’s decisive ruling for the Jane Does.

After a few weeks, Scientology filed a petition for a rehearing with the court, asking what had happened to the AI issue, but the appeals court denied the petition without comment.

So then, Scientology petitioned the state supreme court about the AI matter, but also threw in its tantrum about Fair Game.

Now that the state supreme court has rejected that petition, Scientology can go back to waiting for the intermediate court to rule on AI sanctions.

Or, it can petition the US Supreme Court. And we wouldn’t put it past them.

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