David K. Colapinto
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David K. Colapinto is an attorney for Kohn, Kohn & Colapinto, a Washington, D.C. law firm specializing in employment law.
Colapinto was born in Springfield, Massachusetts on December 4, 1958. He received his J.D. degree from Antioch School of Law (Class of 1987) after graduating from Boston University with a B.A. in history.
While at Boston University, he was an investigative reporter for the B.U. Exposure, a student-run independent newspaper dedicated to exposing financial and ethical irregularities of the administration of B.U. President John Silber. In a 1980 60 Minutes interview with Mike Wallace, Silber denounced the B.U. Exposure staff as "short-pants communists".
The law firm of Kohn, Kohn & Colapinto represents whistleblowers. The firm has represented whistleblowers in the government (including Federal Bureau of Investigation agents claiming racial discrimination and, most famously, Department of Defense employee Linda Tripp), and in the private sector (including the nuclear industry). Washingtonian Magazine, in its December 2004 issue, named the firm the top whistleblower within the Beltway. (Colapinto's partners are Stephen M. Kohn and Michael D. Kohn).
The firm also handles suits filed under the Qui tam provisions of the False Claims Act[1]. These provisions allow persons and entities with knowledge of fraud committed against the federal governemnt to sue the perpetrator on behalf of the United States, either with the government joining the action or, if the government declines, as a private plaintiff on their own. Qui tam has its roots in the Abraham Lincoln administration, as Lincoln was concerned with fraud by government contractors during the Civil War.
One of the firm's clients recently suffered a setback after a preliminary victory in the major Federal income tax case of Murphy v. IRS[2]. The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia had held 26 U.S.C. § 104(a)(2) to be unconstitutional to the extent that it fails to exclude, from gross income, compensatory damages for emotional distress and loss of reputation unrelated to lost wages. On December 22, 2006, however, the Court vacated its own judgment and set the matter for a new hearing on April 23, 2007.
Colapinto was successful in the first case in which a "hostile work environment" was found to exist for a whistleblower who worked at a nuclear power plant. He also helped obtain whistleblower protection for Federal Bureau of Investigation employees and helped force the F.B.I. crime lab to obtain accreditation, the latter development involving him in the O.J. Simpson Trial. As co-counsel to Dr. Frederic Whitehurst, Colapinto was behind the lawsuit that forced the Department of Justice to implement regulations protecting F.B.I. employee whistleblowers. He is General Counsel for the Forensic Justice Project.
Colapinto and his partners are the authors of the book Whistleblower Law: A Guide to Legal Protections for Corporate Employees (Praeger Publishers, 2004).
