NEW YORK (AP) — A man convicted of using digital-age
tools to impersonate and malign his father’s academic rivals on the
ancient subject of the Dead Sea Scrolls was sentenced Monday to two
months in jail after the state’s highest court tossed out some of his
convictions — and with them, a state aggravated-harassment law.
The
sentencing of Raphael Golb, who also got three years’ probation, came
after the Court of Appeals upheld convictions on other charges,
including criminal impersonation and forgery.
Golb had been sentenced
earlier to six months’ jail but free on bail during his appeal.
Golb was given a surrender date of July 22, but could ask the courts to hold off the jail term while
appealing the case further.
From
the start, the case was a rarity. Claims of Internet imitation seldom
spur criminal trials at all, let alone trials that air an abstruse but
vigorous scholarly dispute over the Scrolls’ origins. And with the high
court’s May ruling, Golb’s case gained another distinction: striking
down an often-used aggravated harassment law that police and prosecutors
saw as an important tool for pursuing domestic violence and other
cases, but Golb called an unconstitutional intrusion on free-speech
rights.
The state Legislature has since passed a revised version of the law that they believe will pass muster
with courts.
Golb,
a literature scholar and lawyer, acknowledged disguising his identity
in emails and blog posts to discredit detractors of his father’s views
on the scrolls’ origins.
Containing the earliest known versions of
portions of the Hebrew Bible, the scrolls have enhanced scholars’
understanding of the history of Judaism and the beginnings of
Christianity since their discovery in caves in Israel, beginning in the
1940s. Some researchers believe the texts were assembled by a sect known
as the Essenes; others — including Golb’s father, historian Norman Golb
— say the writings were the work of a range of Jewish groups and
communities.
Raphael Golb used various online aliases to take on
his father’s adversaries in the debate, at one point opening an email
account in a prominent Judaic studies professor’s name and sending out
messages in which that professor appeared to confess to plagiarizing
Norman Golb’s work. The professor denied it.
Raphael Golb said the
electronic barbs were satire, not crime. But the Manhattan district
attorney’s office and jurors said the emails and posts amounted to a
campaign of offenses including second-degree aggravated harassment. The
misdemeanor charge involved communicating with someone "in a manner
likely to cause annoyance or alarm" and with the intent to do so.
Golb’s
lawyer, Ronald Kuby, argued that it turned criticism into a crime if
the object of the complaint felt irritated, but not necessarily
imperiled.
"You cannot arrest somebody for being annoying," Kuby
said in a recent interview. "Unwanted communication is not a threat — it
is merely unwanted communication."
The Court of Appeals agreed the law was "unconstitutionally vague and overbroad."
In
the aftermath, some prosecutors around the state dismissed pending
charges and advised local police to stop making arrests under the
second-degree aggravated harassment law. The law had often been used as a
basis for issuing a court order barring domestic violence suspect from
continued contact with their alleged victim; there were more about 7,600
pending second-degree aggravated harassment cases statewide as of last
month, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said.
With Cuomo’s support, the state
Legislature has since passed a revised version of the law that backers
believe will pass muster with courts.