Court overturns ex-Goldman Sachs programmer’s conviction

A New York judge has thrown out the conviction of ex- Goldman Sachs Group Inc programmer Sergey Aleynikov, saying prosecutors failed to prove that he broke an “obscure” law by copying some of the bank’s high-frequency trading code.

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Daniel Conviser gave his decision on Monday, overturning the guilty verdict by a jury in May.

Sergey Aleynikov was found guilty in May on one count of stealing “secret scientific material” from the Wall Street banking giant. In February he filed suit against the Federal Bureau of Investigation agents who arrested him for allegedly violating his civil rights, and he is also suing Goldman Sachs to recover his legal fees, which reportedly have reached more than $7m.

Aleynikov was arrested on federal corporate espionage charges in 2009, convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison.

He was released from prison when the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit overturned the conviction in 2012.

A spokeswoman said Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance is deciding whether to appeal the case.

“We think this defendant committed a crime”, Joan Vollero said in a statement Monday.

©2015 by The Associated Press. He was preparing to take another job at trading firm Teza Technologies in 2009 when he copied 32 megabytes of computer source code from the Goldman system onto a personal server.

On May 1, a 10-person jury convicted Aleynikov after more than a week of deliberation that was interrupted by the dismissal of two feuding jurors. The case raised questions about whether intellectual property disputes should be handled as lawsuits between companies and employees, or whether workers should face prosecution for such behavior.

A Goldman Sachs spokesman declined to comment on the decision.

Yet a State judge quickly ruled that double jeopardy does not apply and that New York prosecutors could make their own case against the Russian-born programmer because the charges were different.

Aleynikov is now suing Goldman in federal court to pay for his defence.

Aleynikov’s case was part of the inspiration for Michael Lewis’ book, “Flash Boys“, about high-frequency trading.

“With today’s decision, Sergey Aleynikov has been acquitted of every single crime two sets of prosecutors could conjure in their zeal to do the bidding of Goldman Sachs”, he said.