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Conviction of former Goldman programmer is overturned

A court has again overturned the conviction of Sergey Aleynikov, the former Goldman Sachs programmer charged with stealing some of the confidential computer code for the Wall Street bank's high-speed trading program.

The ruling handed down Monday by Justice Daniel P. Conviser of the state Supreme Court in Manhattan sets the stage for state prosecutors to either appeal the decision or let Aleynikov's six-year legal odyssey through the federal and state court systems in New York come to an end.

"It feels great," said Aleynikov, who wore a striped tie and white shirt in the courtroom.

Conviser said he did not find sufficient legal evidence to support the jury's conviction of Aleynikov on a single charge of unlawful use of secret scientific material, a criminal statute that predates the digital age and includes some phrases and terminology that seemed to baffle both the jurors and judge at times.

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"The court holds that viewing the evidence in a light most favorable to the people, the prosecution did not prove the defendant made a 'tangible reproduction or representation' of secret scientific material," the judge said.

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 jury had wrestled with the case, asking for numerous readbacks of testimony and explanation of the terminology of phrases in the criminal statutes that Aleynikov was charged with violating.

Aleynikov, a 45-year-old former Goldman software programmer who was born in Russia and is now a US citizen, was first arrested July 3, 2009. His first conviction on federal charges was overturned in 2012 by a U.S. appeals court, which ruled that federal prosecutors in the case had misapplied the corporate espionage laws against him.