John Reece Roth, professor emeritus of electrical and computer engineering, was convicted on September 3, 2008, of one count of conspiring with Atmospheric Glow Technology Inc., a Knoxville technology company, to unlawfully export in 2005 and 2006 fifteen different “defense articles” to a citizen of the People’s Republic of China in violation of the Arms Export Control Act. He was also convicted of fifteen counts of violating the Arms Export Control Act and one count of wire fraud relating to exporting sensitive military information relating to an air force contract and depriving the university of his “honest services.”
On July 9, 2009, at age 72, he was sentenced to four years in prison and two years of supervised release after completion of the prison term. He was allowed to remain free pending appeal, and on January 5, 2011, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the conviction and sentence. Roth appealed to the US Supreme Court, which, on October 3, 2011, declined to hear the appeal. He reported to prison on January 18, 2012, at the Federal Correctional Institution in Ashland, Kentucky.
In 2010, while Roth’s case was still on appeal, the US Supreme Court struck down the so-called honest services statute as being unconstitutionally vague. On March 10, 2014, Judge Tom Varlan reduced Roth’s sentence to 42 months, declining to release Roth, who appeared in court in a wheelchair. He had served roughly 26 months of the prison term.
Roth came to the University of Tennessee in 1978, where he developed a technique for creating a type of ionized gas, or plasma, in air at room temperature. Since 1994 he had been experimenting with using the plasma to control the flight of aircraft. By ionizing air as it traveled around a wing’s surface, Roth created a plasma that could reduce drag dramatically, allowing airplanes to take off and land at steeper angles and on shorter runways. In 2000 Roth’s work won him a three-year grant of about $500,000 from the air force. The technology was also licensed in part to Atmospheric Glow Technologies (AGT), a small Knoxville firm that Roth founded with his former student, Daniel Sherman. In June 2005 AGT received a $750,000 air force contract to develop the plasma for use in unmanned drone aircraft. Then AGT gave Roth a subcontract to further develop his ideas.
The violation of the Export Control Law involved allowing a Chinese National graduate student to work on the project and taking sensitive data to China on a lecture tour. Atmospheric Glow Technologies was fined $25,000 for its role in the violation, and Sherman pleaded guilty and received a 14-month prison term. The probe began in 2006, when Roth was told by Office of Research officials that the Chinese graduate student could not work on the project. Roth fully retired from UT in summer 2008.