DP Plagiarizer Won A Prestigious Penn Writing Prize?

Well, this is interesting. We just got wind that the winner of the Nora Magid Mentorship Prize, a seriously prestigious prize that goes to a graduating senior who has shown promise in non-fiction writing, was awarded to a former DP columnist. And not just any DP columnist, but one who in fact wrote a plagiarized column for the paper in 2007 and was subsequently fired.

Such background information is not hard to come by, as a Google search of the writer's name will quickly reveal both the published article itself and a scathing IvyGate post on the subject.

We do acknowledge that everyone makes mistakes, the winner definitely has talent as a writer (so did Stephen Glass), has had impressive internships and yeah, it was a few years ago. However, it did happen during the writer's Penn career, for the school paper. Did the judges forget to Google or just not care? Anyway, this just seems kind of surprising, or there's something we're missing.