June 11, 2008

Artist Cleared of All Charges in Precedent-Setting Case

Department of Justice Fails to Appeal Dismissal

Kurtz Speaks about Four-Year Ordeal

Buffalo, NY -- Dr. Steven Kurtz, a Professor of Visual Studies at SUNY at Buffalo and cofounder of the award-winning art and theater group Critical Art Ensemble, has been cleared of all charges of mail and wire fraud.  On April 21, Federal Judge Richard J. Arcara dismissed the government's entire indictment against Dr. Kurtz as "insufficient on its face."  This means that even if the actions alleged in the indictment (which the judge must accept as "fact") were true, they would not constitute a crime.  The US Department of Justice had thirty days from the date of the ruling to appeal.  No action has been taken in this time period, thus stopping any appeal of the dismissal.  According to Margaret McFarland, a spokeswoman for US Attorney Terrance P. Flynn, the DoJ will not appeal Arcara's ruling and will not seek any new charges against Kurtz.

For over a decade, cultural institutions worldwide have hosted Kurtz and Critical Art Ensemble's educational art projects, which use common science materials to examine issues surrounding the new biotechnologies.  In 2004 the Department of Justice alleged that Dr. Kurtz had schemed with colleague Dr. Robert Ferrell of the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health to illegally acquire two harmless bacteria cultures for use in one of those projects.  The Justice Department further alleged that the transfer of the material from Ferrell to Kurtz broke a material transfer agreement, thus constituting mail fraud.

Under the USA PATRIOT Act, the maximum sentence for these charges was increased from five years to twenty years in prison.

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Politics

Bioterror in Context

How and why the threat of bioterrorism has been so greatly exaggerated. A Miller-McCune interview of UCLA's William R. Clark.

By: Matt Palmquist | May 19, 2008 | 05:00 AM (PDT) |
William R. Clark, professor and chair emeritus of immunology at the University of California, Los Angeles, has been a research scientist for 30 years and has written a string of books for the general public. His latest, Bracing for Armageddon?, published by Oxford University Press in May, examines the science and politics of bioterrorism in the United States.
His conclusion: We shouldn't be so worried. Although the United States will have spent $50 billion on defense against a bioterrorism attack by the end of 2008, Clark argues that we have much more to fear from natural pandemic outbreaks, such as the viruses causing SARS and H5N1 avian flu. He reviews all the worst-case bioterror scenarios — from agricultural terrorism to poisoning the water supply; from genetically engineered pathogens to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's official list of bioterrorist weapons — and writes: "It is almost inconceivable that any terrorist organization we know of in the world today, foreign or domestic, could on their own develop, from scratch, a bioweapon capable of causing mass casualties on American soil."

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