The Road From Play Action To Plagiarism Is... Murder!!!

The level of butthurt from Aaron Hernandez's lawyers is astounding.

I used to plagiarize the hell out of encyclopedia entries. If some weathered-old hag of a 6th grade teacher was going to ask me to write a report on the state bird of Kansas, you better believe that a Mr. Funk and Mr. Wagnall were going to be quoted heavily. And better than that, they weren’t going to be quoted at all! Because I was straight gaffling passages left and right out of those big, dusty volumes. Although the Sturnella neglecta eats grain, it also has a prodigious appetite for crop-damaging insects. That “prodigious appetite” bit? All me. A+!

So yeah, middle school was a breeze.

Yesterday, Aaron Hernandez’s defense team failed in its attempt to move Hernandez’s trial. As part of their argument before the court, they accused prosecutors of plagiarizing from their more accomplished brethren. In the process, they laid bare why the legal profession can, and will, soon be taken over by foreigners. Or robots.

Or foreign robots…

The fact that Aaron Hernandez’s lawyers wanted to move his trial to another venue is not surprising. It’s a fairly standard strategy for famous defendants to seek impartial juries in places where the Internet doesn’t exist, infamy is a local disease, and jurors are sure to be fair and completely blank slates.

And like all procedural tricks of the trade, it’s been argued before. Defense lawyers have moved for change of venue, prosecutors have briefed the other side, judges have farted or belched or scratched their nuts or ladyparts or whatever it is that judges do while they pretend to be engaged in the act of settling petty disputes.

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So it can’t have been a surprise when prosecutors flagrantly lifted passages from the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev case when they wrote their own brief against moving the Hernandez trial. Surprise or no, the defense didn’t like it:

“Leaving aside all of the reactions one might have on many levels to this extensive, undisclosed submission of another’s work to a court, the conduct appears to convey a lack of interest on the part of the Commonwealth in fashioning its own vigorous opposition to Hernandez’s motion for a change of venue,’’ Hernandez’s attorneys wrote.

“By simply cutting and pasting the work of others, the Commonwealth conveys the message that a recycled opposition is sufficient to blunt Hernandez’s motion for a change of venue. In so doing, the Commonwealth greatly misapprehends the well-founded basis for Hernandez’s motion and the unique circumstances of this case,’’ the defense wrote.

In its filing, the defense identified eight places where, they said, Sutter’s office had echoed the words of prosecutors in US Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz’s office “nearly word-for-word.’’

Wait until the defense gets a load of the prosecution’s case in chief, a nearly note-for-note remake of the prosecution’s case against Pee Wee Herman for public masturbation in 1991.

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