Attorney suspended for term paper offer

Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers disciplines lawyer caught in CommonWealth sting

The state’s Board of Bar Overseers issued a six-month license suspension to a former attorney for the Massachusetts Appeals Court who offered to write a law school term paper as part of an undercover investigation of term-paper trafficking conducted by CommonWealth.

The board said Damian Bonazzoli violated the Massachusetts Rules of Professional Conduct for lawyers, which states that it is professional misconduct for a lawyer to “engage in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation.”

The board said a six-month suspension was warranted because Bonazzoli never actually sold any term papers and that he had already received substantial adverse publicity on the Internet, in legal publications, and in the legal community. The agency also pointed out that Bonazzoli acknowledged the “wrongfulness of his conduct” before the matter was brought to its attention. Bonazzoli was previously fired from his job as senior staff attorney for the Appeals Court for running his term paper business, which the court called a “serious lapse of ethical judgment.”

Bonazzoli was one of 62 term-paper writers advertising on Boston’s Craigslist who responded in 2009 to an email inquiry sent out by a CommonWealth reporter, posing as a student, seeking to have a 20-page, double-spaced term paper written on the subject of physician-assisted suicide.  The responders quoted prices ranging from $90 to $1,200, with the average price being $370, or $18.50 a page.

“I’m offering the only service on the Internet that guarantees you a quality grade for a paper that I will write or edit for you,” one of Bonazzoli Craigslist ads promised. And relying on his experience with the Appeals Court, another of Bonazzoli’s ads bragged, “I have ghostwritten literally hundreds of published judicial opinions, articles, and so forth.”

Bonazolli wanted $300 to write the term paper on physician-assisted suicide and, as part of his sales pitch, he sent along, unsolicited, his resume, which revealed that he was employed as a senior staff attorney for the Appeals Court -- a job that paid him $94,000 a year -- and graduated summa cum laude from Boston College Law School.

Not mentioned in the BBO ruling was a Massachusetts criminal statute passed in 1972 that bars the sale of term papers if those involved know or have reason to know that the material will be submitted for academic credit and represented as original work.

Bonazolli hung up on a reporter who called him for comment on Monday. In 2009, when Bonazolli was contacted by CommonWealth for comment after agreeing to write the term paper, he said: “It is the responsibility of students to adhere to the ethics codes that their schools set for them. I don’t see any ethical conundrum from my perspective.”

Homepage illustration by Phil Disley