The book is so big, it will take years to throw it at you
In May 2004, FBI agents driving a black Suburban and wearing SWAT gear ran Evertson off the road near his mother’s home in Wasilla, Alaska. When Evertson was face down on the pavement with automatic weapons trained on him, an FBI agent told him he was being arrested because he hadn’t put a federally mandated sticker on a UPS package.
A jury in federal court in Alaska acquitted Evertson, but the feds weren’t finished. They reached into their bag of over 4,500 federal crimes and found another ridiculous crime they could use to prosecute him: supposedly “abandoning” hazardous waste (actually storing, in appropriate containers, valuable materials he was using for the clean-fuel technology he was developing). A second jury convicted him, and he spent 21 months in an Oregon federal prison.
April 2nd, 2010 at 10:08 am
I sure feel much safer. Thanks FBI for be ginormous jackasses who can’t stand to be proven wrong. Talk about being childish.
April 2nd, 2010 at 1:38 pm
Book now on my list….
April 2nd, 2010 at 3:52 pm
This sounds a lot like the Thomas Butler case. He was a professor at Texas Tech University who studied bubonic plague (and had contracts with the NIH, FDA, CDC, and DOD). At one point, he noticed some vials of plague were missing from his lab refrigerator. He reported it to the FBI. Nobody ever really found out what happened to them — probably destroyed by mistake. (It sounds scary, but the risks were way overblown.) At that point the Feds, for unknown reasons decided to prosecute Butler for a host of “crimes.” One of which was a clerical error when he sent a plague sample to the CDC via FedEx or UPS. Also for carrying plague samples on his person when returning from Africa where he retrieved them himself from infected persons. (Again, sounds dangerous, but as an expert like Butler would tell you, not at all dangerous in the form in which he was carrying the samples.) Also a number of crimes stating that he had embezzeled money from the University (which, apparently, described standard operating procedures for researchers who obtained outside funding grants). Anyway, he had the book thrown at him (69 counts) and he was convicted on numerous charges, most of them financially related. IMO, he was railroaded by the Feds and the University. Fortunately, he got off with a fairly light sentence (2 years) after numerous scientists, including several Nobel Prize winners, wrote in on his behalf. But still his career was destroyed.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer has a 7-part series on Dr. Butler’s case, if you want to read (a lot) more:
http://www.cleveland.com/plague/