Former Harvard University chemistry professor Charles M. Lieber was sentenced April 26, ending a legal process that took more than 3 years. Federal judge Rya W. Zobel sentenced Lieber to the time he served when he was arrested, on Jan. 28, 2020; 2 years of supervised release, the first 6 months of which Lieber will be confined to his home; and a $50,000 fine. The sentence included $33,600 in restitution to the US Internal Revenue Service that Lieber paid before last week’s sentencing hearing.The sentencing follows Lieber’s conviction on Dec. 21, 2021, when a jury found him guilty of tax offenses and making false statements to investigators about his work with a university in China. He was prosecuted as part of the US Department of Justice’s China Initiative, a controversial program that ended last year. Lieber retired from Harvard on Feb. 1.The sentence is more lenient than the US attorneys recommended. They asked for 90 days of incarceration and 1 year of supervised release, which would include 90 days of home confinement, as well as a $150,000 fine in addition to the restitution to the IRS.
I broadly can't get too excited by zero days of jail versus 90 days, but at the same time, I think this feels a touch lenient. I suppose that this is good evidence that the justice system isn't going to be very hard on professors who get caught lying to federal agents, even as I think we can pretty clearly say that part of the process of being charged with a federal crime is a punishment in itself.
I genuinely think that the China Initiative was a 100% failure within the criminal justice system. Maybe the tours of academic science that the FBI did to talk about "research security" might have protected some American IP, but the clearly Chinese-targeted efforts by the DOJ and subsequent prosecutions have, in my opinion, harmed American science far more than the value of the hypothetically-protected IP. I'd like to think I could have designed a better program, but putting a bunch of stupid-not-evil Chinese engineering professors (and one truly moronic Harvard professor) through this wasn't what I would have done.
What would I have done? I dunno, but here's my retrospective program:
- Visits to all relevant Thousand Talents professors from federal prosecutors, saying to these professors "pretty sure you filled this declaration out wrong, how about you fix it?"
- A thorough tour of academia by DOJ lawyers of top academia, focusing on the actual problem (potential IP theft), and what can/should be done
- A thorough hardening of American industrial, governmental and academic labs for both cybersecurity and external intelligence threats
- A diplomatic initiative to the Chinese government, going the opposite direction that the US government did - knock this "stealing IP" stuff off, or we're going to provide one-way tickets to all your top young people. They already come here to study - what if we made it easy for them to stay, and we started our own Million Talents program?
All those Congressmen spouting anti-Asian racism make it easy to dismiss legitimate concerns about research security. I admit I never took this stuff seriously in grad school because I thought it was just racists thinking every Chinese person is a spy, every Middle Easterner is a terrorist, etc.
ReplyDeleteThat's a much too lenient sentence to that dirty tax-dodger. What a slap in the face to us honest, law-abiding chemists.
ReplyDeleteCome on now CJ. When you initially posted about his arrest a few years ago, I remember the comments in there and they were pretty much stating a middle aged white male with a PhD employed at an ivy league school will likely not see any jail time.
ReplyDeleteAnd here we are with it pretty much confirmed. Meanwhile a man in Louisiana is serving life in prison for attempting to steal hedge clippers from someone's garage.