LUBBOCK, TEXAS—Former Texas Tech professor Thomas Butler was sentenced to 24 months in prison yesterday (March 10) for illegally shipping Tanzanian plague samples back to that country and for defrauding the university in unrelated research he performed for pharmaceutical companies.

Stone-faced and tense through the entire proceeding, Butler showed no emotion when his sentence was read, but his 14-year-old daughter Christina and several family friends in the audience of 50 began sobbing, anguish visible on their faces. Butler and his wife Elisabeth have four children, ages 6 to 22.

Butler must also pay $19,700 in federal fines and assessments and $38,675 in restitution to the university. He is not eligible for early parole because none is allowed in the federal justice system. He can appeal his convictions, but he does so at the risk he might receive a substantially longer sentence if he loses, according to his Lubbock lawyer Floyd Holder.

The 62-year-old scientist refused to speak to reporters after the sentencing, except to tell The Scientist, “I would like to talk to you but I'm kind of disabled.” Earlier, during a break before the sentence was announced, he said, again only to The Scientist, “I'm sitting here trying to endure it. I don't have any comment.”

After he delivered the sentence, federal district judge Samuel Cummings said that he had not yet determined where Butler will serve his jail time. Holder said he hoped it would be at Big Spring Federal Correctional Institution, a low-security facility about 100 miles south of Lubbock where inmates live in barracks and manufacture light carts for the military. Butler must report to federal authorities April 14, but he is free on bond until then.

In a settlement with the university in January, Butler paid $250,000 in restitution and resigned as chief of the division of infectious diseases in its medical center. Also in January, he voluntarily surrendered his Texas medical license to avoid having it automatically revoked for his being a convicted felon. Two weeks ago, Elisabeth Butler told The Scientist that she and her husband had already paid $1.2 million in legal fees.

Butler made worldwide news in January 2003 when he reported 30 vials of Tanzanian plague samples missing from his lab. Sixty FBI agents descended on the campus, interrogating him overnight and into the next day. Butler finally signed a statement saying that he had lied, and that he had actually destroyed the samples. However, he recanted that confession almost immediately, claiming that that he agreed to it only because a senior agent told him that if he signed it, the statement would calm the public's fears and he could go free. Butler has maintained ever since that he still doesn't know where the 30 vials went.

In December a federal jury in Lubbock found Butler guilty of improperly sending some of the Tanzanian samples back to that country's government, shipping them in a FedEx container not labeled as plague and doing so without a federal export license for hazardous material. It acquitted Butler of lying to the FBI, smuggling plague from Tanzania, and evading income taxes on the drug-company research.

The jury also found him guilty of 44 of 54 additional counts filed last September that he defrauded Texas Tech when he signed drug-testing contracts with pharmaceutical companies giving him half the payments and the university half, rather than giving the school the whole amount.

Holder and Elisabeth Butler said that prosecutors originally offered a plea bargain of a six-month jail term, resignation from Texas Tech, and a payment of $850,000 before they filed the 54 counts. According to his wife, Butler responded, “enough is enough” and refused to accept the offer.

Butler's sentence would have been several times as long had Judge Cummings not “downwardly departed” markedly from the sentencing range suggested by formulas in the federal sentencing guidelines. Cummings said he began his deliberations with a range of 78 to 97 months. Holder said the pre-sentencing investigation conducted by the court's probation department had recommended an even higher sentence of 97 to 108 months.

Cummings gave several detailed reasons why he lowered the sentence, one of which was the testimony of William Greenough, a professor of medicine and international health at Johns Hopkins University and a long-time Butler friend. When Greenough explained that a paper Butler wrote in 1970 was instrumental in establishing oral hydration as a treatment for diarrhea and that the World Health Organization credits that therapy for saving the lives of two to three million children under the age of four each year, some people in the audience gasped. Butler had received letters of support from several prestigious scientific organizations and a number of Nobel laureates.

Agreeing that Butler's research “has led to the salvage of millions of lives,” Cummings said, “there's not a case on record” to rival Butler's “exceptional” contributions. “It's outside anything the government's guidelines could have [contemplated].”

Holder said afterward that the judge was “sticking his neck out” by dropping the sentence as much as seven years, because US Attorney General John Ashcroft “has pretty much laid down the law that any sentence below the sentencing guideline will be appealed.”

Speaking to reporters outside the courthouse, assistant U.S. attorney Robert Webster was noncommittal. “If the defendant does not appeal,” he said, “it's going to be a hard decision to go forward [with a federal appeal] on this case, because we believe the decision to be fair.”

The sentence “sent the appropriate message in the scientific and academic communities,” Webster continued, “that the government is not going to tolerate the cavalier attitude of deadly agents moving in commerce.” Assistant U.S. attorney Richard Baker said the sentence should assure the traveling public that from now on “they'll be flying Southwest Airlines instead of Bubonic Airlines.”

Holder said he thought Butler had already decided to appeal his convictions, but that the decision was still subject to review. Butler's other main trial attorney, tax lawyer Charles Meadows, said he thought no decision had yet been made.

When Meadows took his turn addressing reporters outside the courthouse, he quickly became emotionally overwhelmed. “We're pleased the judge downwardly departed,” he said, his voice starting to crack. Then he blurted out through tears, “we're upset he didn't go further” and quickly walked away.

Correction (posted 3/12/04): When originally posted, this story incorrectly named assistant attorney Richard Baker as Robert Baker. The Scientist regrets the error.