Wen Ho Lee Prosecution and Pre-Trial Detention, Los Alamos
Taiwanese-American nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee was fired from Los Alamos National Laboratory and held in solitary confinement for 278 days on espionage charges that largely collapsed. Critics argued the prosecution was driven by racial profiling and pressure to punish someone for alleged nuclear secrets leaks, chilling speech among Asian-American scientists.
In March 1999, the Clinton administration publicly identified Los Alamos physicist Wen Ho Lee as a suspect in leaking nuclear weapons design data to China. He was fired in March 1999 and indicted in December 1999 on 59 counts under the Atomic Energy Act. Federal judge James Parker ordered him held without bail in solitary confinement, shackled when moved, for nine months. In September 2000, the government dropped 58 of 59 counts; Lee pleaded guilty to one count of mishandling data. Judge Parker issued a remarkable apology from the bench, stating he was 'ashamed' of how the executive branch had misled the court. A bipartisan Senate report in 2001 found the FBI investigation was flawed and that Lee had been singled out partly on the basis of his ethnicity. The chilling effect on Chinese-American scientists and researchers at national laboratories was widely documented by civil liberties organizations.