On August 5, 2010, a Kentucky jury convicted Karen Sypher on six counts of extortion, lying to federal investigators, and retaliating against a witness. The federal prosecution stemmed from a one-night sexual encounter between Sypher and University of Louisville men’s basketball coach Rick Pitino at a local restaurant in 2003. At the eight-day trial, prosecutors proved that Sypher demanded $10 million plus a home and a car from the coach in exchange for her silence, falsely accused him of rape when he reported the attempted extortion to authorities, and later lied to the FBI.
By the time Sypher began serving her eighty-seven-month prison sentence in April of 2011, she was not the only member of the defense team who emerged scarred. When District Judge Charles R. Simpson III denied the defendant’s posttrial motions seeking a new trial, the court criticized her lawyer for writing a brief that “appear[ed] to have cobbled much of his statement of the law governing ineffective assistance of counsel claims by cutting and pasting, without citation, from the Wikipedia web site.” “[S]uch cutting and pasting, without attribution,” warned Judge Simpson, “is plagiarism.”
United States v. Sypherfollows other recent decisions that have chastised lawyers for briefs or other written submissions marked by plagiarism, “[t]he deliberate and knowing presentation of another person’s original ideas or creative expressions as one’s own.” Some lawyers have copied passages from earlier judicial opinions that rest in the public domain and some lawyers (as in Sypher) have copied passages from private sources that are subject to copyright laws. In either event, courts have labeled lawyers’ plagiarism in court filings as “reprehensible,” “intolerable,” “completely unacceptable,” and “unprofessional.”
