Hi all!

An E-bud of mine sent me this and I thought you might want to check it
out.

Later!-Gary


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Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2004 15:43:43 -0400


  Woman: BU trumped up plagiarism
By David Weber
Monday, August 30, 2004

A 26-year-old woman disabled with cerebral palsy claims Boston University dashed her dreams of becoming a lawyer by trumping up charges of plagiarism against her and booting her out of law school six days before graduation.

      Layla Kiani, a magna cum laude undergraduate double major from the University of Texas, had all but completed her three years of law study at BU when two professors leveled the plagiarism charges against her in May 2003. She has filed a lawsuit in Suffolk Superior Court against the school.

      ``This all happened more than a year ago, but I am still in shock every day,'' Kiani said.

      Kiani, who moves about in a wheelchair and whose reduced motor skills limit her physical ability to write, admits she committed errors in footnoting and attribution in four of her papers. But she said she never intended to sneak anything by her instructors.

      Kiani said she believed BU had deemed her methods on the papers to be sound because they had passed muster previously.

      ``If you turn in a paper and get a grade (C-minus) on it, you would think you are OK,'' she said.

      After the initial plagiarism charge was made in May 2003, Kiani said, another professor notified the school that he too believed Kiani had plagiarized in a paper from the prior year.

      Kiani, who claims misprescribed anti-anxiety medication caused her to experience chronic drowsiness that affected her grades, said she felt a ``false sense of security'' when she submitted her first troubled paper without incident one year before the plagiarism charges.

      BU associate general counsel Lawrence Elswit defends the school's decision to cut Kiani loose after her grades were lowered because the plagiarism charges caused her average to drop below 2.0.

      ``Without getting into too much detail, the evidence of plagiarism was indisputable and overwhelming,'' Elswit said.

      Kiani's lawyer, Ben Tahriri, said, ``You have a colossal institution going against diminutive woman who's gone through 10,000 hoops to get where she is today.'