Convicted as an ecoterrorist, a brilliant young scholar nose-dives in prison. warning:
its long, but read it even if just to ask the one single question..how could this happen.
Billy Cottrell in kindergarten. When Billy Cottrell was first sent up to Lompoc Federal Penitentiary, he thought he had landed the perfect job. A brilliant student of theoretical physics at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Cottrell has a high-functioning form of autism that makes it difficult for him to pick up on people’s emotions, but also gives him a grave appreciation for detail. At Lompoc, he thought, he would do secretarial duty in the “boiler-room office,” spending many hours alone, filing, sorting, typing and proofreading. He could be useful.
Before his first day, however, prison officials got nervous. They knew Cottrell was smart; they’d seen his physics textbooks and writings. And wasn’t this the kid who’d been convicted of blowing up Hummers somewhere in Los Angeles? Thinking he might find a way to rig the water heaters to blow up the prison, Cottrell says, they denied him the job.
Next, Cottrell was offered a job mowing Lompoc’s copious lawn. This appealed to Cottrell’s jittery need for physical exertion. Before he was arrested, he could run a marathon in under three hours, even sleep-deprived and hopped up on Rockstar energy drink. Once again, however, the penitentiary’s guardians said no: Cottrell says prison guards worried that he might use the gasoline in the lawn mower to make a bomb.
Finally, Billy Cottrell — who got kicked out of high school a few times yet wrote an essay to the University of Chicago so impressive he was accepted into its competitive math-and-science program, who snagged an appointment at Caltech to study the arcane complexities of string theory, and who many prominent scientists consider a genius — found a job he could keep. He stood up to his knees in filth, sorting through his fellow inmates’ putrid detritus in the prison dumpsters.
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It’s a job most prisoners get as a single day’s punishment. Cottrell did it for three and a half months.
Since the day he arrived at Lompoc, 18 months ago, say his lawyers, family and friends, Cottrell has been harassed, threatened and taunted by the prison population and, in some cases, also by the guards and the administration. Because in the rigid world of prison, Cottrell has been labeled a terrorist.
Lompoc guards whispered the word at him as he passed. Visitors heard guards refer to him as their “very own ecoterrorist.” Cottrell later learned he had been used as an example in a training video on how to deal with terrorists in prison, “so now every prison guard in the country recognizes me as a terrorist on sight,” he wrote in a January 10 letter to the L.A. Weekly. He has been denied common privileges such as exercise, visitors and phone calls. Ultimately, he was banished to solitary confinement — the Hole, in prison parlance — like a violent thug.
And all because of one night in the summer of 2003, when Cottrell helped two friends deface and destroy dozens of sport utility vehicles in the name of the environment. Those who know of Cottrell and his tough prison sentence stretching to 2010 — the judge piled on an additional three years, without benefit of a jury rendering — say Cottrell is being mishandled, persecuted and, within the prison walls, compelled to become the very radical his prosecutors argued he was in court.
Meanwhile, he awaits word on two legal fronts: first, whether the California 9th Circuit believes jurors should have heard about his autism, and second, whether the federal courts will mirror the California Supreme Court in declaring judge-rendered sentence enhancements unconstitutional.
Back when he was sentenced in April 2005 to eight and a half years in prison, the judge, an ex-Marine named R. Gary Klausner, didn’t think Cottrell’s intellect or his autism should have justified leniency. But a great many scientists around the world, including Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time, have publicly objected to the apparent fact that his intellect and psychological quirks, combined with the “terrorism” label attached to his crime, have provoked prison guards to single him out.
“Billy has been selected for the especially harsh treatment reserved for ‘a terrorist,’ ” reads a letter in Cottrell’s defense signed by Hawking and seven other prominent scientists. “[His] treatment in prison, far from being rehabilitative, is nothing short of nightmarish.”
The letter was distributed to prison authorities and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals at Cottrell’s October 18 hearing, held to determine whether the jury should have understood his psychiatric diagnosis — which the judge barred from the trial. But instead of helping him in prison, the letter seemed only to make things worse: Two weeks after the hearing, Cottrell was mysteriously thrown in the Hole.
University of Chicago professor Peter Freund, who drafted the letter his colleagues, including Hawking, later edited and signed, calls Cottrell’s ordeal “a tragedy.” One of the world’s pre-eminent authorities on theoretical physics, Freund supervised Cottrell’s senior thesis on string theory, the work that landed him a coveted spot working with Hiroshi Ooguri in Caltech’s physics department.
“If you told me John Doe was treated this way, someone I didn’t know at all, I’d feel revulsion at this systematic way the prison system is destroying a human being,” Freund says. “It’s horrible and it’s unfair. But with Billy, it’s also a loss to science. It’s too painful to watch without doing everything you can to stop it.”
There was a time, not too long ago, when Billy Cottrell was an eccentric but amiable Ph.D. candidate at Caltech, “a few degrees removed from reality,” according to Freund, but harmless. He had not yet been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, the peculiar form of autism whose sufferers typically excel at advanced math and fail miserably at social skills.
But looking back, the signs were there: You might imagine him similar to Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man, only less eccentric, much smarter and, as he would tell you, much better-looking. “He always talked kind of fast, like a robot,” says his mother, Heidi Schwiebert. “I used to call him my little Mr. Spock.”
Cottrell disliked silly, institutional rules: At the University of Chicago, he once refused to complete an assignment and instead turned in a lengthy and detailed essay on why the assignment was dumb. And he displayed bad judgment sometimes, says his friend Jesse Bloom, who has known him since the two were undergraduates at the University of Chicago. “When we had [David] Letterman on campus at Caltech,” Bloom remembers, “Billy ‘streaked’ [naked] across campus because people were daring him to do that.”
But he was not much of an environmentalist, or even all that liberal. In fact, in his 2004 trial, covered by Newsweek and CNN, no evidence ever emerged — and the prosecutors never suggested — that Cottrell was involved in the environmental movement at all. He watched Bill O’Reilly as regularly as he read The Nation. He voted for Schwarzenegger. He did not rebel against society so much as hold accountable the lazy people running it.
“Billy believed that most problems could be traced to lazy people who would rather complain than put in a little hard work, and he thought they should show more determination and stop making excuses,” says Bloom. “But I never saw him be mean or hostile to anyone.”
On the night of August 22, 2003, Cottrell would later testify, he had only intended to tour around Southern California with his friends Tyler Johnson and Michie Oe, plastering SUVs with bumper stickers. Going in, the plan was so innocuous, rising only to the level of a graffiti prank, that even Cottrell’s mom, Heidi, was involved.
An attractive blonde in her 50s, with big blue eyes and a curly bob haircut, Schwiebert is a horsewoman, although that’s where her interest in environmentalism ends. But she was fed up enough with polluting road hogs that she volunteered to print up bumper stickers for the three young people that would say “SUV = TERRORISM.” “I told the printer I didn’t particularly agree with the slogan myself, but I supported their right to free speech,” she recalled. At the printer’s, another “I” slipped in, and the stickers came out condemning “TERRIORISM.”
In the defense account of that night, Tyler Johnson, angry about the misspelling, demanded that Cottrell pay him back the $200 he’d spent on materials. Johnson offered to forgo the $200 if Cottrell would use his own car to chauffeur Johnson and his girlfriend, Michie Oe, around town while they spray-painted the offending gas-guzzlers.
Johnson and Oe, say Cottrell and his lawyers, had run out of gas. Cottrell agreed to take his car instead. On the way, Cottrell stopped at a gas station, and they filled several containers with gasoline.
At a Mercedes lot in Arcadia, Johnson, Cottrell and Oe sprayed seven or eight $30,000-to-$40,000 vehicles with slogans like “Fat, Lazy Americans” and “I [heart] Pollution.” In nearby Monrovia, they sprayed a Toyota Tundra and a Honda Passport with “Polluter” and “Killer.” At one car lot in Duarte, they painted 21 SUVs with the words “SUV’S Suck Hi,” and “Smog Machine.” At another Duarte lot, they hit 26 more. And on several vehicles they scrawled the initials ELF, the acronym for Earth Liberation Front.
As far as anyone knows, no ELF really exists; its Web site, www.earthliberationfront.com, is no more than a front for Viagra and repo ads (and now it’s for sale) (See LA Weekly's "Earth to ELF: Come In, Please," December 22, 2005). But in April of 2003, a few months before the SUV vandalism spree and five months before Cottrell’s arrest, the FBI’s assistant deputy director for counterterrorism, John Lewis, had gone before a Senate committee claiming that ELF and like-minded groups were America’s greatest domestic-terrorist threat. The feds were eagerly prosecuting a number of alleged environmental saboteurs who fit that view.
Because of the acronym spray-painted on the vehicles, says one of Cottrell’s lawyers, Michael Mayock. “They were watching this case at the highest levels in Washington.”
Against this tense national backdrop, Cottrell’s lawyers, Mayock and Marvin Rudnick, had asked the jury to believe that Cottrell was shocked when Johnson, without warning, stuck a rag in one of the just-filled gas containers, lit it and lobbed the homemade Molotov cocktail at a red 2003 Hummer H2 at the Clippinger Hummer dealership in West Covina. Cottrell’s defense relied on his claim that he was not part of that plan, that he insisted Johnson stop, and that he believed that Johnson would not lob another device.
But Johnson pulled out another Molotov cocktail, and then another, and another. He pummeled the Clippinger Hummer lot with so many of the minibombs, in fact, that the fires lit up 14 vehicles. All told, on that August night, after several hours of cruising, defiling and burning, 125 SUVs and other vehicles were damaged and destroyed, racking up $5 million in damage to vehicles that had traveled between states — a technicality that invoked the Interstate Commerce clause and made Cottrell’s a federal case.
The jury didn’t buy Cottrell’s defense, and no wonder. Both Johnson and Oe had disappeared before Cottrell’s arrest, and are still at large. There was no extracting their story about their night of arson. The jury had plenty of evidence to place Cottrell at the crime, including the use of his red Toyota Camry and his image on one dealership’s surveillance video.
Most important of all, Judge Klausner allowed no discussion on how Asperger’s might have affected Billy Cottrell’s judgment.
One of the most incriminating pieces of evidence left behind in Duarte that night was the carefully scrawled equation eiπ + 1 = 0, a magical formula discovered by Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler in the 18th century. It was also the very formula Cottrell and a friend had painted on the University of Chicago’s astronomy-building tower years ago, climbing up to write it in large print near the roof. The presence of the equation on the SUVs made it easier to connect the crime to Cottrell. In effect, Cottrell had left a calling card.
It takes a certain mastery of mathematics to appreciate the beauty of this equation, known as “Euler’s identity,” a simple, elegant line of code that employs five fundamental mathematical constants. If you can’t quite grasp that — most people can’t — you might be able to understand why Cottrell seems an oddball to so many people
and announced by a news release of the University of Southern California (USC). Some of the conclusions of this report about brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are quite surprising at least to a jaded mind like mine.
and announced by a news release of the University of Southern California (USC). Some of the conclusions of this report about brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are quite surprising at least to a jaded mind like mine.
