A panel of appellate judges has tossed out the top identity theft charge in a wacky, Dead Sea Scrolls cyber-bully indictment from 2010.
The panel’s decision — which upholds the remainder of the conviction against disbarred Manhattan lawyer Raphael Golb, including an additional ID theft count — means he now faces resentencing in the case.
Golb, 52, had been sentenced to six months jail in Nov. 2010, following his conviction on identity theft, criminal impersonation, forgery, harassment and unauthorized use of a computer. But he has remained free pending the appeal decided yesterday.
In convicting Golb, a jury had found he used a series of emails to impersonate and harass the academic rivals of his father, noted Scrolls researcher Norman Golb.
The son has remained free on $25,000 bail as he challenged the conviction on First Amendment grounds, insisting he meant it all as a Constitutionally-protected parody.
His lawyer, Ronald Kuby, called the panel’s decision a blow to the First Amendment rights on the Internet, and said he would immediately appeal in hopes of keeping his client at liberty.
“Nothing in this prosecution, or in the court’s jury charge, violated defendant’s First Amendment or other constitutional rights,” the appellate panel said in yesterday’s decision.
“The evidence clearly established that defendant never intended any kind of parody,” they wrote. Instead, he intended to “injure” his targets,” the panel wrote — and to benefit his father’s career.
The panel did toss the top identity theft conviction against Golb, explaining that the DA’s office failed to prove that Golb had tried to defraud anyone out of $1,000 or more.
“There are hundreds of thousands of examples of people who email or blog under assumed names,” Kuby said in response to the decision.
Now, he added, “virtually all of the online community can be criminalized at the discretion of the DA.”