Though most people blithely cross life’s moral mine fields, occasionally someone comes along who feels obliged to draw a line in the sand.
Or the cat litter, in Petr Taborsky’s case.
“I don’t think of myself as the kind of person who likes to get into conflict,” Taborsky says. “If anything, I try to avoid it.”
It is true that Taborsky’s appearance is consistent with his self-image. At 35, he still has the classic mien of an adolescent nerd. He looks exactly like the kind of bright college kid who’d stay up nights in a science lab searching for new uses for clinoptilolite, the scientific name for cat litter.
On the other hand, he was delivering this self-assessment in prison, having baited more than one judge into giving him time behind bars following his conviction on charges of stealing “intellectual property”–in this case a process for using cat litter to solve municipal sewage problems. Last summer, Florida’s governor, Lawton Chiles, tried to send Taborsky home, but he refused to go. He said he couldn’t accept a pardon because he doesn’t think he did anything wrong.
That unbending stance, the stuff of which martyrs are made, can be impressive even to those on the other side of the legal battles that took Taborsky from the halls of ivy to a prison chain gang. Circuit Court Judge Bob Mitcham, for example, was moved to say something nice about him in a hearing after Taborsky was imprisoned late in 1995.
“He is not a bad person,” the judge said, looking down from his bench at Taborsky. “He did what he thought was right and I don’t fault him for that.”
Yet others are sent into apoplexy by the mere mention of his name, first among them, Francis Borkowski, the former president of the University of South Florida, the institution with which Taborsky has been playing a legal cat-and-mouse game for almost a decade.
Upon Taborsky’s initial conviction in 1990, Borkowski wrote the judge, insisting that Taborsky be slapped with a prison term–not just probation as is usually given to first-time offenders, especially in cases of white-collar crime.
“The sad fact is that he is beyond rehabilitation,” the president said of Taborsky, who had been a dean’s list student at USF.
In truth, it would take the wisdom of Solomon–or maybe Alice in Wonderland–to unravel the struggle between Taborsky and his alma mater. It is true that a jury of his peers convicted him of filching his self-touted discovery from a professor who, the jurors found, had really done the work.
Yet when the professor and Taborsky each applied for a patent on the process, the U.S. Patent Office decided in Taborsky’s favor, granting him Patent No. 5,082,813.
Which, in all probability, makes him the first person ever to be imprisoned for stealing something that the U.S. government says he discovered.
Science in his genes
All of this began in 1987 when Taborsky, an undergraduate at USF majoring in chemistry and biology, needed a campus job. His sister Dagmar introduced him to Robert P. Carnahan, an engineering professor with whom she had worked.
In fact, all the Taborsky siblings were scientific prodigies, which is hardly surprising. Their father and grandfather were notable scientists in Czechoslovakia before taking refuge in America. Petr, Dagmar and another sister Blanka grew up on a tropical-fish farm their parents still tend, about 45 miles from the prison, the Tampa Community Correctional Center, where Petr currently resides. To this day, the walls and bookshelves of the family’s home are lined with medals and trophies from the dozens of science-fair projects the kids won. A nearby trailer is littered with the test tubes and beakers of their childhood laboratories.
On his sister’s recommendation, Petr was hired by professor Carnahan to be his lab assistant for a project sponsored by Florida Progress Corp., a utility conglomerate. The company hoped to find a way to use clinoptilolite, a clay-like substance, as a filter in sewage-treatment plants. But the initial attack on the problem taken by the professor and his student failed to yield results.
Undaunted, Taborsky pressed on by himself, taking another tack. Working nights and sleeping on the laboratory’s floor, he found that heating clinoptilolite to 850 degrees dramatically increased its ability to absorb the kind of contaminants found in waste water.
When he reported that finding to his professor, the latter replied (by both Taborsky’s and Carnahan’s account): “This could be worth millions.”
The only question was: Who would harvest all those potential bucks? Carnahan felt bound by an agreement he’d signed with the company saying that any scientific advances coming out of the project belonged to Florida Progress.
Taborsky, though, hadn’t been asked to sign any such waiver. He felt that his discovery went beyond the bounds of the original project and therefore was his and his alone. A patent attorney he consulted seconded Taborsky in that opinion.
At first, both sides danced around a compromise: Florida Progress would give Taborsky a job. He’d license the company to use his process. But when he looked at the fine print, Taborsky thought he was getting the short end of the stick. As the proposed contract allowed the company to fire him at will, he could find himself out on the street while Florida Progress reaped the profits of his new-and-improved cat litter turned sewage-filter.
So he decided to patent his discovery on his own, which prompted the university to lower the boom. Academic observers recall that at that time, USF was anxious to move out of the research bush leagues and wanted to signal potential contractors that it would protect their interests. Usually, disputes over intellectual property are resolved in civil courts. But USF had Taborsky arrested as a common thief, a decision that even a current lawyer for the university finds a bit much.
“I would have made an attempt to resolve the dispute short of going to a criminal process,” said Henry Lavandera, who inherited the resulting mess from his predecessors in the office of USF’s general counsel. “The university could have asked a civil-court judge for an injunction preventing Taborsky from patenting the process.”
Dispute becomes a crusade
In the short run, the university’s strategy worked. Taborsky was found guilty in 1990. And while the judge didn’t give him prison time, as the university had asked, he told the young man to keep his nose clean. To reinforce that message, he put him on probation for 15 years.
To outsiders, that sentence (and what followed) may seem extreme. It’s hard to explain how someone could go from filing a contested patent to working on a chain gang–except that this is still a part of the world where the old boy networks are alive and well, and men and powerful institutions live by a you-scratch-my-back etc. mentality.
Probably 99 percent of the human race would have heeded the judge’s warning. Taborskys, though, are differently made. When Petr told his father that he intended to press on, Jiri Taborsky urged caution.
“My son said: `Papa, all our lives you’ve taught us to stand up for our rights. And now you want me to forget that?’ ” Jiri Taborsky recalled.
Those were lessons that Jiri had taught by deed as well as word. He had taken part in the rebellion of 1968 when the Czechs unsuccessfully attempted to throw off the yoke of their Soviet masters, and was forced to flee to America afterwards. He had already spent time in a labor camp as a teenager for helping others escape the country. Also, Jiri’s own father had similarly opposed the country’s dictatorship, which cost him his career as a scientist.
That reflexive resistance to tyranny has been bred into the Czechs by geography and history, Jiri Taborsky notes. The very name Taborsky resonates with the Czechs’ history of standing up to their more-powerful neighbors. It means someone whose forebears came from Tabor, a Czech city that was the stronghold of the Hussites, a group of 15th Century church dissenters who made their final stand there against the much larger forces of their German Catholic overlords. Many went to their death convinced that, in matters of conscience, might can never make right.
“My ancestors fought in the Hussite Wars,” Jiri likes to say. “I suppose that I don’t have to tell you on which side?”
For his part, Petr pressed his crusade on the patent-office front, eventually being granted three patents for his discoveries. Frustrated and embarrassed, the university hauled him back to court in 1992. Threatening him with prison, the judge ordered Taborsky to sign over the first of his patents to USF. Florida Progress, having dropped out of the water-purification business, wanted out of the case and had assigned its rights back to the university.
“When you think about going to jail, it’s so terrifying I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning,” Petr Taborsky said. “But at some point I made the decision I wasn’t going to let them use the criminal court to get something they weren’t entitled to.”
A public relations mess
For refusing to surrender his rights to his discovery, Taborsky was given 3 1/2 years of prison time. After losing several appeals, Taborsky, who was working in a private scientific laboratory, began serving that sentence early in the fall of 1995. Taborsky’s case became a cause celebre when local media found him on a chain gang, an assignment usually reserved for hardened criminals.
Smelling a public-relations disaster, Gov. Chiles asked his staff to look into the matter and Taborsky was transferred to a minimum security facility. Also, Florida’s General Counsel Dexter Douglass wrote the university posing embarrassing questions about the Taborsky affair, such as: “Why did the University of South Florida spend in excess of $330,000 for private attorneys when the state attorney at that time was handling the case?”
By then the university, too, was anxious to get the story out of the headlines by helping to spring Taborsky from prison. With a new president in place, USF was now willing to share the cat-litter breakthrough with Taborsky–the very man it had accused of stealing it seven years earlier. Even university officials can appreciate the irony of that about-face.
“This case has had so many twists,” said George Newkome, the university’s vice president for research. “It’s like swinging at a pinata. It goes back and forth, back and forth.”
But, as USF and Chiles found, it’s easier to put a Taborsky in prison than to get him out. Petr refused to negotiate or accept the governor’s clemency. He said he was content to stay put and devote himself to a student-rights organization he had formed on the Internet.
Besides, he found that prison isn’t as bad as he feared but, in fact, can be downright interesting. He has been studying life behind bars with the same unquenchable scientific curiosity he once brought to cat litter. Prisoners, he found, hold each other to a well-defined code of social behavior. Respect it and they respect you.
“Life in here is like a mirror,” Taborsky said. “What you send out is what comes back.”
His fellow inmates dubbed Petr “the professor.” He won their friendship by helping them write appeals of their convictions. When he was about to be transferred, his fellow chain-gang members threw him a going-away party.
“They offered to get some marijuana smuggled in but Petr said he didn’t use drugs,” Jiri Taborsky said. “So they served hot chocolate and cookies instead.”
Currently, Petr is scheduled for release on April 1. USF officials hope (and no doubt pray) that it will mark the beginning of the end of the affair. Petr, though, intends to press a civil case for damages against the university. He wouldn’t mind at all if the school took him back to criminal court on the issue of his second and third patents. Asked to turn them over, he would again refuse, knowing the likely consequences.
The more times he goes in front of a judge, Petr reasons, the more the odds improve that someday, somewhere, a court will vindicate him.
“We have a saying in here: `They–the judges, prison officers–have already shot off their weapons,’ ” Petr Taborsky said. “I feel that I have all the ammunition now.”
