AP: Texas

12/12/2005

By BETSY BLANEY  / Associated Press

A former university professor convicted of fraud after his report of missing plague bacteria from his lab prompted a bioterrorism scare will be released from a halfway house Jan. 2, a federal prison system official said Monday.

Dr. Thomas Butler, 64, is completing his two-year sentence at an undisclosed halfway house in Lubbock, said Joe Savage, a spokesman for the Federal Medical Center Fort Worth, where he served until Nov. 21.

On Jan. 14, 2003, Butler reported the vials stolen. Within hours, dozens of federal agents swarmed to Lubbock and a frantic search for the vials ensued. It ended when Butler gave FBI agents a written statement in which he admitted a "misjudgment" in not telling his supervisor that the vials had been "accidentally destroyed," according to court records.

The incident sparked a bioterrorism scare, and President Bush was briefed out of concern that terrorists may have been involved. During his trial Butler testified FBI agents forced him to make the admission to calm the public's fears.

Butler was convicted in December 2003 on 47 of 69 charges, with most of the guilty verdicts related to charges he defrauded the university's health sciences center. The charges stemmed from a federal investigation that followed his report.

In January 2004, Butler agreed to settle with Tech for $250,000 pertaining to these charges, and to retire. The following month he voluntarily gave up his medical license to the Texas State Board of Medical Examiners.

Once he gets out, he'll return home to his family and begin searching for work, his appellate attorney, Jonathan Turley, said Monday.

His wife, Elisabeth Butler, said her husband has heard of possible employment opportunities.

"He really wants to work," she said.

Butler was accompanied back to Lubbock by Peter Agre, a longtime friend and winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in chemistry, who along with the National Academy of Sciences had protested Butler's prosecution.

Agre felt so strongly that Butler was being made a scapegoat in the case that he contributed some of his Nobel Prize money to his friend's defense.

Agre, the vice chancellor for science and technology at Duke University, said in an e-mail from Stockholm, Sweden, that Butler wants to return to his studies. Before his arrest Butler had been studying plague for more than 25 years and considered one of the world's foremost experts on the disease.

"Tom is not broken by the experience, but he wants to get back to his research on infectious diseases," Agre said in the e-mail. "I believe that Tom remains confident that he is a decent citizen caught in a crazy situation."

Turley said members of the international scientific community are rallying to help Butler find work.

In late October, a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Butler's convictions. Turley said he filed a petition Nov. 7 to have the full circuit review the appeal.

Should the full court follow the three judges' ruling, "our current intention is to go to the (U.S.) Supreme Court," Turley said. The decision will be Butler's, though, he said.