The Supreme Court will not order a new trial for a University of Tennessee professor convicted of giving foreigners access to sensitive data on military unmanned aircraft.The high court on Monday refused to hear an appeal from John Reece Roth, a plasma physics expert who was found guilty in September 2008 of violations of the Arms Export Control Act and sentenced to four years in prison.
While he worked as an electrical engineering professor, Roth was also a minority partner in Knoxville-based Atmospheric Glow Technologies Inc. The company won an Air Force contract to a develop plasma-guidance system for unmanned aircraft, according to court documents.
Roth allowed two foreign graduate students from China and Iran to assist him with the work and gave them access to sensitive data. Roth was also convicted of taking sensitive documents to China on his laptop during a lecture tour in 2006.
The Arms Export Control Act prohibits the export of defense-related materials to a foreign national or a foreign nation. The government’s case against Roth was the first time the government used the act to crack down on the distribution of restricted data to foreigners in a university setting.
Roth challenged his conviction and argued in his appeal that the information he was accused of illegally sharing was improperly classified. He said that the system he was developing was going to be tested in commercially available aircraft before it was incorporated into military aircraft.
He also argued in his appeal that he did not willfully violate the act when he took a proposal for a project for the Department of Defense with him on his laptop during a trip to China. He said he had not opened the file and could not have known what it contained.
Earlier this year, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the conviction and the sentence and rejected his arguments. They ruled that Roth knew the document was a proposal to build military munitions based on sensitive, export-controlled technology and that University of Tennessee officials had warned him not to take anything related to that technology to China.
Source: Knox News