A once-renowned Yale University professor and Princeton alumnus was sentenced to a term of 20 years in prison for sexually assaulting a New Haven youth and possessing child pornography.
Antonio Lasaga '71 was sentenced last week in a case that pitted the interests of the academic world against criminal justice.
In February, Lasaga's federal and state criminal cases were finally put to rest after a four-year saga. On Nov. 6, 1998, the FBI obtained a warrant and searched Lasaga's office and apartment, where they found two computers containing hundreds of pornographic images of children.
In later searches, agents found incriminating tapes of his encounters with a young boy he met through a New Haven mentoring program. The tapes led to two charges of rape and molestation, which allegedly occurred during a six-year period in the early and mid 1990s when the boy was between 7 and 13 years old.
In the final tally, the FBI found about 150,000 illegal pornographic images on his computers. These pictures led to two federal charges that resulted in a 15-year maximum federal sentence and a five-year state sentence when combined with his no contest pleas to sexual assault.
Lasaga was one of the world's most renowned geochemists. He received the Mineralogical Society of America's award of the year in 1998 and was considered by one peer to be "Nobel Prize material."
During the sentencing, Lasaga's academic peers advocated leniency because of the expertise that would be lost to the scientific community by imprisoning one of its luminaries.
For example, the Hartford Courant reported that Heinrich Holland '46, a Harvard University earth sciences professor said, "All of us in science are expendable, but the loss of the most capable are felt the most strongly."
In response to the professors' courtroom comments, the prosecutor David Strollo said after the trial, "In all my years as a prosecutor, I have never heard people deliver comments so disconnected with reality."
Lasaga's former wife Evelyn and 27-year-old son Peter said Lasaga's parenting skills and academic achievements should lessen his punishment.
At Yale, Lasaga served as master of Saybrook College, one of the university's 12 residential colleges. He was suspended and later resigned from his positions in 1998 after being charged with the crimes.
Heinrich and Strollo could not be reached for comment.
The two sentences will run consecutively though Lasaga's lawyer Diana Poulan said she would appeal the length of the sentence.
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