<human>: Give me a shortened version of the text

Hey Reddit,

My group mates (let's call them John, Dick and Harry) were working on a project. It's pretty common practice in this class to write every part of the report separately then at the end bring it all together. We had access to a report from a previous semester and we were looking at that for formatting and outline. 

Dick decided that the things he wrote didn't sound nice enough and decided to copy a few sentences. He "didn't realize that it was such a big deal in the US." (Dick is a foreign exchange student and actually sent me an email afterwards apologizing) Dick dropped the class before we got the report back. 

Usually, with the way the course is laid out, we would all be punishable with our professor's discretion. Our professor, however, has been approaching this from the beginning on the basis that the people responsible will be punished - and he has signed documentation from all of us describing what parts we worked on. 

John and I are being punished because our paper "closely follows the layout of the other paper." I'm not sure if Harry was punished but an email from the professor stated that his decision was based on the fact that not everyone contributed equally to the plagiarism which implies to me that someone received a lesser punishment.

The punishment that John and I received was a 0 on the project grade (worth 6 percent of the final grade) and a letter grade in the course after. Dick doesn't know how they plan on following through with this punishment since he's no longer in the course and received a notice saying the same thing. 

I'm meeting with a board of four faculty members and two students on Monday to appeal the punishment. How should I go about it? What should I say?

All of the copying is in Dick's section of the paper but our professor believes that John and I have plagiarized based on the "closely follows the layout" bullshit. Our professor showed us "examples" of this by circling sections where we included things specified in the rubric of the project and said we took it from the other paper.
<bot>: An idiot plagiarized his section of the paper and the rest of us are being held accountable. What should I say to an appeals committee?