Petr Taborsky, a former student research assistant at University of South Florida who was imprisoned in November in a dispute with the university over the ownership of patents, was transferred today to a work-release center in Tampa.
Although Mr. Taborsky, 34, will have more freedom at the center, he still faces civil and criminal charges. But state officials announced this week that he did not deserve imprisonment or chain-gang duty, to which he had been assigned for two months.
I don't know what he was doing in prison," Harry Singletary Jr., the State Corrections Secretary, said on Wednesday after ordering the transfer of Mr. Taborsky pending further decisions in his case.
Although Gov. Lawton Chiles agrees with Mr. Singletary and is ready to receive Mr. Taborsky's application for clemency, the university maintains that Mr. Taborsky stole valuable property and must be held accountable.
Mr. Taborsky was an undergraduate in chemistry and biology, working as a laboratory assistant at the university's College of Engineering in 1987, when he took part in a research project to make sewage treatment cheaper and more efficient. The project was sponsored by a subsidiary of Florida Progress, a utility holding company. The university said the company had all rights to the research.
Mr. Taborsky, who did the testing for the project, discovered a way to turn a clay-like compound similar to cat litter into a reusable cleanser of sewage, a process that has potentially valuable applications.
The project's principal investigator, Robert P. Carnahan, maintains that Mr. Taborsky was part of a research team and that the discovery stemmed from the team's decisions. But Mr. Taborsky said that he made his discovery after the project had ended and that he conducted related experiments on his own.
A jury convicted Mr. Taborsky of grand theft of trade secrets in 1990. He was sentenced to a year's house arrest, a suspended prison term of 3 1/2 years and probation for 11 1/2 years, as well as 500 hours of community service. Mr. Taborsky violated the terms of his sentence when he obtained three patents related to the research. The ownership of the three patents is still in dispute.
