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Prosecutors have suggested a 27-month prison term for self-driving vehicle engineer Anthony Levandowski.

Levandowski requested 12 months of home confinement and claimed that going to prison in the middle of a pandemic would be a “death sentence” since the Federal Bureau of Prisons has been unable “to control the spread of the coronavirus.”

Court documents claim that over the past six years, Levandowski has repeatedly suffered from respiratory illnesses, including pneumonia in 2015 and 2017. 

“While Mr. Levandowski certainly must be punished for his crime, we submit that, given the grave risks it carries, a custodial sentence right now is unnecessary and unwarranted in this case,” according to court documents.

In March, Levandowski agreed to plead guilty to one count of trade secrets theft.  Sentencing for Levandowski is expected today in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

The Justice Department charged Levandowski with 33 counts of intellectual theft and attempted theft of trade secrets from his former employer, Waymo, which he allegedly took over to the ride-hailing company, Uber. The 32 other charges were dropped as a result of the plea agreement.

A tech pioneer falls from grace

Levandowski was once known as the global expert in autonomous vehicles. He spent 15 years developing the technology. No one denies he made vital contributions to the self-driving car industry and he went on to create multiple successful startup ventures. 

Levandowski first joined Alphabet-owned Google in 2007, as a software engineer working on Google Maps’ Street View. About a year later, while he still worked at Google, Levandoski formed a startup, Anthony’s Robots. Both on and off the job he continued to develop artificial intelligence (AI) and self-driving technology.

After a successful test of Levandowski’s PriBot, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin embraced the self-driving car project. Google's self-driving car project “Project Chauffeur” later became Waymo LLC, a subsidiary of Alphabet.

Prior to leaving Waymo parent company Alphabet in 2016, prosecutors allege that Levandowski downloaded 14,000 Project Chauffeur documents. Levandowski admitted to taking the data from his work computer and downloading it to his personal laptop in December 2015, weeks before he left the company. 

Levandowski founded his own autonomous trucking startup, Otto, in 2016 and six months later Uber bought Otto for nearly $700 million.

Trouble on all sides

In February 2017, Waymo sued Uber and Levandowski over the IP theft.