We’ll start with the speculation. First, what the heck happened during the Honor Code proceedings? It’s not clear, and as we’ve explained before, Honor Committee deliberations are confidential.
The Honor Committee does publish public summaries of its proceedings on its website. But if you review the summaries currently on the site, you’ll see no proceeding involving a law student. Perhaps there’s a lag time before publication; if anyone from the UVA Honors Committee is reading this story, please be advised that you need to update your website to reflect Perkins.
UPDATE (1/12/12): A tipster directs our attention to Article IV, Section H, Subsection 8 of the U. Va. Honor Committee By-Laws, which provides that “the Chair of the Committee may refuse to publish an Official Summary of a particular trial” if the summary “would allow a reasonable person in the school community, who does not have personal knowledge of the relevant circumstances, to identify the [accused] student with reasonable certainty.” Given the notoriety of the Perkins case, it’s quite possible that we’ll never see a summary — which is unfortunate, and which will leave the Committee open to continued criticism, since the public has no way of determining whether its ruling in the Perkins case was rational.
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What might have transpired? Here’s one rumor making the rounds:
[The rumor is that Perkins] got off due to some convoluted reasoning about the incident being so public (a kind of twisted tainted jury pool argument I guess), and that the students who run the Virginia Law Weekly were in trouble with the UJC (judicial committee for non-honor code violations) for making it so public before the proceedings ended.
If that’s true, this is all ass-backward.
UPDATE (11:30 AM): The Virginia Law Weekly denies that any of its staffers were in trouble with the UJC over Perkins coverage.
Second, as others have wondered, why does Perkins refer to himself as a “legal intern” rather than an attorney? Terms like “legal intern” or “law clerk” typically refer to law school graduates who are working in legal environments but not yet admitted to the bar in the relevant jurisdiction. Since it appears that Perkins is not admitted to the Pennsylvania bar, it makes sense that he calls himself a “legal intern.”
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Third, why isn’t Perkins a member of the PA bar? Did he not sit for the bar? Did he not pass? It is probably not the case that he sat for the bar exam, passed the bar exam, and then encountered a character and fitness problem. If that were the case, presumably he would at least appear on the list of July 2011 Pennsylvania bar exam passers. At the current time, his name is not on the pass list. So either he didn’t pass, or he didn’t take the test in the first place.
(For the record, almost all UVA grads pass the bar. In the jurisdiction of Virginia, the school has a pass rate north of 90 percent.)
UPDATE (11:30 AM): A source claims that in Pennsylvania, if you pass the bar exam but get held up by character and fitness, your name does not appear on the pass list until your C&F issues are resolved. In Pennsylvania, unlike New York (the state I’m most familiar with), applicants submit their character-and-fitness information before they take the bar exam in July. The character information is reviewed during the time that the tests are being graded, so individuals with C&F issues can be omitted from the pass list.
Fourth and finally, here’s some opinion. My own view is that even if what Perkins did was wrong, he deserves a second chance. He shouldn’t be barred from the entire legal profession merely because of one incident — a rather bizarre incident, so strange that it’s not clear what he was thinking, so weird that there must be an explanation. As I previously opined:
Could Johnathan Perkins suffer from some mental health issue that caused him to act in this way? Perhaps he will invoke a mental-health justification if called to defend himself against Honor Code charges. Cf. Jayson Blair, Burning Down My Masters’ House: My Life at the New York Times (memoir by former New York Times reporter caught in fabrication and plagiarism scandal, suggesting that the stress of being African-American in an elite environment like that of the Times may have contributed to his unethical actions).
As one of the nation’s leading law schools, UVA can be a challenging environment. Is it possible that Perkins buckled under the stress? There may be extenuating circumstances here of which we are unaware. It’s also not clear that his dishonesty harmed any identifiable individuals in any serious way; instead, his fabricated story sparked discussions about important issues on campus.
Furthermore, remember that the Honor Committee acquitted Perkins, after hearing the full story. The members of the Committee, after receiving more information than we possess, decided to give him a break. Before judging Perkins, shouldn’t we wait until we have all the information the Honor Committee had? I’m reminded of the old saying, “To know all is to forgive all.”
If Perkins was found eligible to receive a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Virginia School of Law, shouldn’t he be eligible to practice law? Is he so much more reprehensible than some of the other colorful characters who already populate this profession?
But maybe I’m being too easy on Johnathan Perkins. Readers, what do you think?
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UPDATE (10/3/2017): We now know much more about what happened to Johnathan Perkins back in 2011 than we did at the time, and it majorly changes how he and the situation should be viewed. See this new story, Was UVA Law Alum Johnathan Perkins Pressured By The FBI Into Recanting His Account Of Racial Profiling?
Johnathan Perkins [official website]
Johnathan Perkins [LinkedIn]
What Ever Happened to Johnathan Perkins? [Constitutional Daily]
Are UVA Law’s gossip headlines self-inflicted? [Charlottesville News & Arts]
Earlier: What’s Casey Anthony Up to These Days?
Prior ATL coverage of Johnathan Perkins
A Law Student Plays the Race Card — and Gets Busted, Big Time
Is Johnathan Perkins, aka the UVA Law Fabulist, Going to Graduate?
Recent Bar Exam Results: Open Thread –Pennsylvania, Virginia — any others?