[fabricode]

No one is being punished for being wrong.

From the article, the problem with the leaders was in how they handled the management of the team and the publicity of the announcement. You know there are problems when many of the collaborators asked to be left off of the paper; insufficient experimental checks were done (according to some team members); some of the team members heard about the results from the press release rather than from their colleagues; and so on.

The team also did not ask them to step down. The internal vote of 16-13 was insufficient to have them removed (2/3 majority required). So they really did step down on their own.

And in the end, "science" worked.