My apologies for leaving out the source of this article - it's from the Boston 
Herald, current URL is: 
http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=41960




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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.'