It’s not often we hear about TMN playing a role in law enforcement, especially when it’s in a plagiarism case (since we’ve enjoyed promoting plagiarism in the past), but some of Matthew Baldwin’s stories are too good to keep to yourself:

Punishment Mounts for Missing Juror
by Lisa Roose-Church, Daily Press & Argus

Livingston County Circuit Judge David Reader ordered Brandon Keith Dickens, 20, to sit in court three days and watch a civil trial for failing to return to jury duty after a lunch break in June.

However, Reader ordered Dickens to serve a fourth day and when asked why, Dickens said his paper “was not good enough.”

But when a court employee commented that the judge “wanted your own work,” Dickens smiled and contended he did not plagiarize the paper.

“I quoted it; I quoted a Seattle man’s experience,” he said.

Dickens’ copying of the paper was quickly discovered when he turned it in to the judge Aug. 30. A court employee recognized phrases in the paper as phrases from an essay the employee had read elsewhere previously.

A quick search on the Internet yielded the source of Dickens’ paper—a story by Seattle writer Matthew Baldwin called “Trials and Tribulations” that appeared in an online magazine, The Morning News.

We’d like to call attention to this sentence: “A court employee recognized phrases in the paper as phrases from an essay the employee had read elsewhere previously.” If that court employee could please get in touch, we’d like to offer them the TMN reader of the week award. (Note, this award has never been given out before, and we have no idea what it consists of.)