Steve Chawkins in the Los Angeles Times:
A 74-year-old Nobel laureate in physics may face prison time for slamming into a van at more than 100 mph last year, killing one passenger and injuring seven others just south of Santa Maria, Calif.
John Robert Schrieffer, a former professor at UC Santa Barbara who won the Nobel Prize in 1972 for a theory he helped formulate at the age of 26, was driving on a suspended Florida license at the time of the Sept. 24 collision, authorities said Wednesday. He had nine speeding tickets on his record.
At an emotional hearing this week in a Santa Maria courtroom, Schrieffer tearfully apologized to the crash victims, who are members of a Ridgecrest, Calif., family and their friends.
But Santa Barbara County Superior Court Judge James Herman was unmoved, sending Schrieffer to a state diagnostic facility where he is to be evaluated for a possible prison term.
More here. More on John Robert Schrieffer here. Update here. [Thanks to Winfield J. Abbe.]