Butler to resign professorship

The Texas Tech University researcher convicted last month of fraud and improperly shipping plague samples will resign his professorship, effective Friday (January 30), according to the university and one of his lawyers, Floyd Holder. The scientist, Thomas Butler, will also pay the university under $300,000 to settle their dispute, according to another one of his lawyers, Jonathan Turley. Butler is likely to be sentenced to 46–63 months in prison for defrauding Texas Tech and illegally transporting plague samples, but the judge in his case is free to reduce his punishment to less prison time or even to none at all, according to a national expert on federal sentencing guidelines. Butler will be sentenced March 4 or 5 in federal court in Lubbock, Texas, Holder told The Scientist. If he is sentenced to jail, Butler will permanently lose his license to practice medicine in Texas, Holder said, because a state medical licensing panel recommended that action last week. Butler also faces an undetermined fine, which could be well over $1 million, which the judge may also reduce. “Usually if someone pays restitution, then there's less of a call for a [separate] fine,” Turley said, and, he hopes, less of a call for a stiff sentence. “We certainly hope the court will take this voluntary act into consideration when setting a sentence for Dr. Butler,” Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School, told The Scientist. Butler, the former director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Texas Tech's medical center, has already paid more than $400,000 in legal fees, at least part of it to Holder and Dallas tax lawyer Chuck Meadows, according to the Committee on Human Rights of the National Academies. On December 1, a federal jury acquitted Butler of charges that he lied to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but convicted him of transporting plague samples improperly and of defrauding Texas Tech by taking half of all drug company payments made in return for his testing drugs on patients at the university's medical center. The settlement sum is roughly the same amount he was convicted of taking illegally, according to court records. Concerning Butler's sentence, “It's going to be 46 to 63 months, anywhere in that range,” said Herbert J. Hoelter, cofounder of the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, a nonprofit organization headquartered in Baltimore, Md., which has worked with lawyers to negotiate lower sentences for defendants since 1977. Hoelter told The Scientist that for a first offender with a good background like Butler has, “you generally assume a defendant would receive the lower end of the guidelines.” However, Judge Sam Cummings could decide that special circumstances in Butler's case give him reason to deviate from the federal guidelines, Hoelter said. “Once a judge decides that, yes, there's reasons to depart here, then the barn door is open,” Hoelter said. “He can depart to one year, two years, three years, or zero years.” In Butler's case, Hoelter said, one reason to depart may be the fact that when Butler illegally transported and exported plague samples, he did so as part of an experiment he conducted in Tanzania proving that gentamicin was effective in treating plague. That discovery was extremely important to the United States, according to several prominent scientists, because only two other drugs have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration against plague, and one of them, streptomycin, is no longer manufactured in this country, making it difficult to stockpile if needed. Late yesterday (January 26) afternoon, the president of Texas Tech's medical center, M. Roy Wilson, issued a statement saying, in part, “With this settlement, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center considers all internal matters with Dr. Butler resolved and will pursue no further actions. We wish Dr. Butler well.” Holder said that Butler had considerable support on the Tech faculty committee, which had been slated to recommend to the university whether it should dismiss him, but which will now be disbanded. Butler's lawyers had argued in court that the payments he took were not only allowed under Tech's rules, but also customary for researchers who are expected to earn part of their own financial support for their research. “They knew they had a very tough time in the committee,” Holder said, “and we wouldn't have gotten it settled otherwise.” Asked why he nonetheless advised Butler to settle rather than fight his dismissal, he said, “And how much money is [fighting] worth?” Meanwhile, a panel of the Texas State Board of Medical Examiners recommended last Tuesday (January 20) that Butler's license to practice medicine in that state be immediately suspended and that if he goes to prison, that it be permanently revoked, according to his lawyer. “Under Texas law, if he goes to prison, he has to have his license revoked,” Holder said. “They have to suspend him until it's resolved whether he's going to go to prison or not.” Board Spokesperson Jill Wiggins refused to confirm Holder's statement or comment at all on Butler's case, but she agreed that Texas law mandates “automatic suspension at the time of any felony conviction and then automatic revocation once all final actions, presumably all appeals and so forth, when it was finally adjudicated.” She said the 18-member board could adopt any recommendations the three-member panel may have made when the full board meets next on February 6. Butler's lawyers are planning to appeal if he doesn't go to prison, Holder said. Wiggins had previously told The Scientist that the board had the right to refuse to revoke Butler's license if his conviction was not related to the practice of medicine. But that was a misstatement, she said this week, because such latitude only applies to misdemeanors, and Butler has been convicted of felonies.

Butler to resign professorship

The Scientist ARCHIVES

Become a Member of

Meet the Author

John Dudley Miller

Related Research Resources

Bunsen Burners and Bad Hair Days

Research Resources

Podcasts

Webinars

Videos

Infographics

eBooks

Taking the Guesswork Out of Quality Control Standards

PFAS: The Forever Chemicals

Unlocking the Unattainable in Gene Construction

Comparing Analytical Solutions for High-Throughput Drug Discovery

Products

Product News

Thermo Scientific™ Centrifuges with GreenCool Technology

Singleron Biotechnologies and Hamilton Bonaduz AG Announce the Launch of Tensor to Advance Single Cell Sequencing Automation

Zymo Research Launches Research Grant to Empower Mapping the RNome

Cytosurge Appoints Magid Haddouchi as Chief Commercial Officer