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.'
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