Federal fraud charges crumble in cases against scientists with China ties

The U.S. government overplayed its hand in prosecuting U.S. academics under the controversial China Initiative, three federal courts ruled last week. In separate cases, attorneys for the Department of Justice (DOJ) had maintained that chemist Franklin Tao, materials scientist Zhengdong Cheng, and mathematician Mingqing Xiao jeopardized the nation’s security and defrauded the government by deliberately hiding ties to Chinese institutions from the federal agencies funding their research. But last week, judges in Kansas, Texas, and Illinois either invalidated some of the most serious charges or handed down relatively lenient sentences for lesser violations. One judge overturned Tao’s fraud convictions, another accepted a plea deal that dropped nine fraud charges against Cheng, and the third sentenced Xiao to probation rather than prison for failing to report a foreign bank account. Legal experts say DOJ’s theory of what constitutes defrauding a funding agency has turned out to be untenable. “These [results] show that the government’s [underlying] theory of the case was questionable,” says Margaret Lewis, a law professor and China scholar at Seton Hall University who doubts prosecutors should have pursued criminal convictions for what are often treated as civil or administrative violations. “The primary duty of a prosecutor is to obtain justice, not a conviction,” she says. DOJ issued a statement after Xiao was sentenced saying the department had...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news