Ex-Professor Says Dismissed Racketeering Case Is Still ‘Devastating’

Next month will be the seventh anniversary of the darkest moment in Joy Laskar’s life.

State agents for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation raided the Atlanta home and office of Dr. Laskar, then a celebrated professor of electrical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He was eventually fired from his tenured job and indicted by a grand jury, accused of misusing university funds and other resources to benefit his private start-up. If convicted, he faced decades in prison and a hefty fine.

It all came to nothing.

Last October, a judge tossed out the state’s case before a trial, ruling that the five-year statute of limitations had expired on the misdeeds that it had accused Dr. Laskar of committing. It was an unceremonious end to an episode that highlighted how entrepreneurial initiatives in academia can go very wrong.

Dr. Laskar, who was the subject of a New York Times article in 2013, decided to speak publicly about the dismissal last week. He had previously remained silent to avoid antagonizing prosecutors, who still hold family items with sentimental value, like a laptop with the only copies of childhood photographs of Dr. Laskar’s three daughters and an unfinished novel by his wife.

“It has been devastating personally, professionally,” Dr. Laskar said by phone, referring to the case against him. “It’s had a huge imprint on us as a family to this day. It will never go away.”

Nick Genesi, a spokesman for the attorney general of Georgia, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Before he was ousted, Dr. Laskar had been a high-profile professor at Georgia Tech, where he brought in tens of millions of dollars in grants and research contracts from companies and government agencies.

He started chip companies on the side, which Georgia Tech encouraged, eager to see successful university spinoffs that had showered riches and prestige on Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other top computer engineering schools.

His relationship with the university was ruptured when an audit led it to accuse him of using university money improperly to help produce prototype chips for one of his start-ups, Sayana Wireless. Dr. Laskar denied any wrongdoing, saying the chips originally served academic purposes.

Academics and lawyers familiar with Dr. Laskar were puzzled by the accusations. For one thing, a state grand jury didn’t indict him on racketeering charges until late December 2014, more than four and a half years after the raids on Dr. Laskar’s home and office in May 2010.

The severity of the response by Georgia Tech stunned people who knew Dr. Laskar. Professors sometimes operate in an ambiguous middle ground where it can be difficult to separate entrepreneurial and academic work, with graduate students, laboratory space and equipment shared between the two. Unless blatant theft is involved, professors who step over the line are usually counseled, not fired and indicted.

David S. Ricketts, a professor of electrical engineering at North Carolina State University and a friend of Dr. Laskar’s, called Georgia Tech's response an overreaction. He said the case was “widely discussed in the academic community.”

“This wouldn’t have happened at M.I.T. or Carnegie Mellon,” said Dr. Ricketts, who has also worked at both universities, as well as Harvard. “Not because it wouldn’t have happened — they would basically have handled it internally. It became so politically charged.”

Jason Maderer, a spokesman for Georgia Tech, declined to comment.

In dismissing the case against Dr. Laskar, a Georgia state judge, Robert C. I. McBurney, said the state had simply brought it too late. That meant Dr. Laskar never got a chance to rebut the state’s accusations at a trial.

“We won in the first inning,” said Craig Gillen, Dr. Laskar’s attorney. “If we had had to play the second inning, we would have won in the second inning.”

Dr. Laskar, 53, now lives in Silicon Valley, where he’s working on another wireless chip start-up, Maja Systems. He said he had exhausted his family’s savings paying legal fees related to his case. He was unable to seek another job in academia with the legal cloud hanging over him.

He said his problems had come up before in meetings related to his start-up and believes it will be helpful that the case was dismissed.

“I think there are some doors that were closed, if you will, but over all we’ve been able to move forward,” he said.