Ex-DuPont employee gets 42 months over trade secret theft
A US federal appeals court has upheld a 42-month prison sentence for an ex-employee of DuPont Industrial Biosciences who stole trade secrets from the firm.
John Isler received the sentence, handed down by the US District Court for the Northern District of Iowa, after pleading guilty to stealing trade secrets and making a false statement to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 2018.
Isler appealed the sentence to the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, arguing that it was unreasonable and based on procedural error.
The case stems from Isler's 2013 departure from the DuPont division, whose product range spans across the food, health, pharma and biotech industries.
Isler left DuPont in August that year to join a smaller rival of DuPont, not named in the Eighth Circuit opinion issued last Friday, December 18.
Isler transferred at least eight electronic files containing DuPont trade secrets and proprietary information to the competitor, including details of ethanol plants overseen by Isler.
An FBI investigation resulted in Isler pleading guilty to trade secret theft, as well as misleading the bureau.
But Isler claimed the sentence imposed by the Iowa court was unreasonable, including because it wrongly took into account his multiple traffic offences, as well as a drug conviction more than 20 years ago.
According to Isler, the Iowa court assigned too much weight to these factors, which were unrelated to the trade secrets case.
But the Eighth Circuit backed the conclusion of the district court judge, who wrote that they were “not very impressed with [Isler] being convicted of speeding 12 times, and those are not old convictions. When somebody keeps doing this, it appears to me they have no respect for the law”.
“Although the drug conviction was nearly two decades old, it was particularly relevant to the issue of Isler’s lack of respect for the law where Isler failed to report for a drug test as required while on pre-trial release,” the Eighth Circuit opinion said.
The appeals court found there was no procedural error in the district court’s sentencing, and upheld the penalty.
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