By Tom Brown
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A jury on Friday convicted a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc (N:GS) programer of stealing the investment bank's high-frequency trading code.
The jury said it had reached a split decision, finding Sergey Aleynikov guilty on only one count of stealing "secret scientific material" from Goldman. They were unable to reach a verdict on another similar count and acquitted Aleynikov on a count of unlawful duplication.
Aleynikov's lawyer, Kevin Marino, said earlier that his client faced between 1-1/2 years and 4 years if found guilty on any of the three counts. Marino indicated in court on Friday he would appeal if the judge did not throw out the verdict.
Prosecutors had charged Aleynikov, a dual citizen of Russia and the United States, with stealing the computer code as he prepared to leave Goldman for a high-frequency trading startup in Chicago.
The conviction came two days after the judge overseeing the case removed two jurors after a conflict between the two marred deliberations.
The judge said on Wednesday that letting 10 jurors proceed, not 12, amounted to "uncharted territory," but Marino said that his client agreed to the smaller jury.
Aleynikov, 45, one of the key figures in Michael Lewis's bestselling book "Flash Boys," was first arrested by federal agents in 2009, and previously tried and convicted in federal court. An appeals court threw out the conviction in 2012, saying the anti-espionage law did not apply and setting Aleynikov free after about a year.
Roughly six months later, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance revived the case in state court and charged Aleynikov in August 2012 with unlawful duplication of computer-related material.
Throughout the state case, Marino did not dispute that his client copied code from Goldman's high-frequency trading software for his own use in June 2009.
However, he said prosecutors failed to prove that Aleynikov had broken the state laws under which he was charged. He said there was no evidence that Aleynikov took anything of value from Goldman by copying the code.
New York Assistant District Attorney Daniel Holmes countered in his closing argument that the case was as "simple" as "a man taking something that he had no right to take."
It remains unclear what prompted the bizarre dispute on Tuesday between the two discharged jurors.
A female juror had accused her male colleague of trying to poison her food, and on Tuesday Marino mentioned that the conflict may have involved an avocado sandwich.
The case is People v. Aleynikov, New York State Supreme Court, New York County, No. 04447/2012.
