In an order as bristly as the late Wilford Brimley’s legendary mustache, a federal judge on Tuesday postponed the sentencing of a former Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist who pleaded guilty to lying about his connection to a Chinese government program.
Sentencing had been set for Wednesday in U.S. District Court for New Mexico, and had not been rescheduled at deadline Friday.
After flooding the court with objections to the U.S. probation office’s pre-sentencing report in the case against Turab Lookman, the defense waited until the last minute to submit its own sentencing memorandum pressing the court not to hand down any prison time, Chief District Judge William Johnson wrote in a terse two-page order.
“If Defense counsel are under the impression that the Court took Defendant’s sentencing memorandum home over this past weekend to review, they are wrong,” Johnson wrote. “The Court sees no reason to have Counsel for the United States, United States Probation, and the Court and its staff jumping through all sorts of hoops and burning the midnight oil to be prepared for this sentencing hearing when Defense Counsel waited to file Defendant’s sentencing memorandum so close to the scheduled hearing date.”
Lookman’s attorneys, Paul Linnenburger and Marc Lowry, filed the sentencing memorandum on Aug. 21, weeks after they submitted two sets of objections to the probation office’s pre-sentencing report: a government-authored dossier about Lookman to help Johnson decide how much leniency might be appropriate in the case.
The maximum sentence would be five years in prison and a fine of $250,000. However, the government is seeking something around the lower end of that range: from zero prison time to about a year, according to other court documents. The defense is adamant that Lookman’s case is special, that of a first-time offender who has already become a model of rehabilitation, and that he should not go to prison.
Lookman was indicted in 2019 for three counts of lying to the federal authorities about his connection to China’s Thousand Talents program. He lost his job at Los Alamos around that time. After pleading not guilty to all three counts, Lookman agreed this year to a plea arrangement in which the government dropped two of the charges.
In their sentencing memo last week, Lookman’s attorneys said even a year of jail time would be too harsh, particularly considering what they called the court’s obligation to craft a sentence that considers “both the act and the actor.”
Aside from his decades of “service to others and scientific advancement … Lookman’s post-offense rehabilitative efforts and growth, lack of criminal history, and severely low likelihood of recidivism show that a low-end sentence will provide adequate protection to the public, just punishment and promote respect for the law,” according to the sentencing memo.
