By Corinne Ramey 

The conviction of a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. computer programmer should be tossed because he has been prosecuted twice for the same conduct, his lawyer told a New York state appeals court Tuesday, marking the latest chapter in a decade-long legal saga.

The legal chronicles of Sergey Aleynikov, who worked at Goldman as a computer programmer from May 2007 through June 2009, have included two trials, multiple appeals and a year in federal prison. Tuesday's appeal, Mr. Aleynikov's lawyers wrote in court documents, is "the final chapter in Aleynikov's decade-long odyssey through the nation's criminal justice system."

In 2009, federal authorities arrested Mr. Aleynikov and accused him of copying Goldman's proprietary code for its high-frequency-trading business, which uses algorithmic trading programs. Mr. Aleynikov then uploaded that code to a server in Germany and brought it on a flash drive to Chicago, where he met with a startup that had hired him to help develop its own high-frequency software.

After a trial in federal court in Manhattan, Mr. Aleynikov was convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison. The Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed his conviction, ruling that the National Stolen Property Act required that the item in question be tangible.

In 2012, the Manhattan district attorney's office charged Mr. Aleynikov with state crimes stemming from the same conduct. In 2015, a jury convicted him of one count of unlawful use of secret scientific material, but the judge later dismissed it, citing insufficient evidence.

A state appeals court reinstated the conviction. Mr. Aleynikov was sentenced to time served.

On Tuesday, a panel of judges from the state Appellate Division's First Department, an intermediate appeals court in Manhattan, weighed whether to overturn that conviction. At issue, Mr. Aleynikov's lawyer said, was whether that conviction violates double-jeopardy laws, which bar someone from being prosecuted twice for the same crime.

"This is nothing more than a complete second bite of the apple," Kevin Marino, a lawyer for Mr. Aleynikov, told the judges. He said the differences in federal and state statutes amount to semantics.

Assistant District Attorney Elizabeth Roper argued that state and federal laws were different and dealt with different conduct.

Several judges indicated they were sympathetic to prosecutors' arguments. "The reason [Mr. Aleynikov was] acquitted is the federal statute didn't address that conduct," said one judge. "The state statute does."

A spokeswoman for Goldman Sachs declined to comment.

 

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 17, 2019 18:17 ET (22:17 GMT)

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