Incident

Incident Description

On May 11 2004 Steve Kurtz awoke to find his wife dead beside him. When paramedics arrived at his house they noticed a makeshift laboratory on an upstairs landing, with an incubator full of toxic-looking bacteria, and alerted the Buffalo Police.

Kurtz assured them his lab was, in effect, his studio; that he was an internationally recognised artist, as well as an art professor at the University at Buffalo, who used molecular biology in his work. He was forced to give the police an impromptu presentation while his wife lay dead in another room - he even stuck his finger in a Petri dish of bright scarlet bacteria and tasted it to prove it was harmless. An autopsy later showed that Hope, his partner of 27 years, had died of heart failure in her sleep.

Police deemed the Kurtzes' art materials suspicious and alerted the FBI. The day after the death of his wife, when Kurtz returned from the funeral home, three car-loads of FBI agents were waiting for him. He was now suspected of bioterrorism. His house was quarantined with yellow police tape. Five regional branches of the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defence, the Buffalo Police, fire department, and state marshal's office swarmed over Kurtz's home. They were protected by white hazmat suits and wore breathing apparatus. In the middle of all this, his next-door neighbour put up a sign of support in the window: "He's not a terrorist, he's my neighbour!"

In 1986, Kurtz and his wife co-founded Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), a small artists' collective "dedicated to exploring the intersections between art, technology, radical politics and critical theory". When the FBI raided his house, Kurtz was researching the history of germ warfare for a new project. He was growing simple types of bacterial cultures, routinely used in high-school biology classes, that could also be used to simulate the mushrooming of anthrax and plague.

Outcome

The FBI detained Kurtz in a hotel; agents took the room across the hall so they could watch his door. Investigators impounded Kurtz's three computers, the contents of his lab, his car, correspondence and a small library of books with titles like Spores, Plagues and History: The Story of Anthrax. They locked his cat in the attic for two days without food or water. They also confiscated his wife's body.

A federal grand jury was convened to evaluate bio-terrorism charges against Kurtz. He was indicted, but not under the biological weapons anti-terrorism act. He and Robert Ferrell, a professor of human genetics at the University of Pittsburgh, were charged with mail and wire fraud, accused of colluding to illegally furnish Kurtz with $256 of harmless bacterial cultures. The crime carried a sentence of up to 20 years. Under the USA PATRIOT Act, the maximum sentence for these charges was increased from five years to twenty years in prison. Kurtz's lawyer argued the case should be thrown out of court. The government's "paranoid over-reaction", he said, is a political attack on Kurtz's subversive art.

The artistic community rallied to the cause, staging protests and organising an auction - that raised $170,000 for his defence.

Federal Judge Richard J. Arcara dismissed the government's entire indictment against Dr. Kurtz as "insufficient on its face." In October 2007, Dr. Ferrell pleaded to a lesser misdemeanor charge after recurring bouts of cancer and three strokes suffered since his indictment prevented him from continuing the struggle.