A former Goldman Sachs computer programmer has been freed from prison after a surprise ruling from a federal appeals court quashed his conviction for stealing computer code.
"Justice occasionally works," said Russian-born Sergey Aleynikov, who walked free after serving one year out of a sentence of eight years or more.
Aleynikov, a naturalised US citizen who emigrated from Russia in 1990, was first arrested in July 2009 as he returned from a trip to Chicago to the offices of his new employer, Teza Technologies LLC.
Prosecutors accused him of taking trade secrets from Goldman Sachs in 2008 to help his new company gain an advantage with high-speed financial trading.
During a two-week trial, defence lawyer Kevin Marino told jurors that his client had merely tried to copy parts of the company's software that came from public software code anyway. He acknowledged that Aleynikov had violated the company's confidentiality agreements but argued that was a civil matter.
Aleynikov was found guilty in December 2010 and sentenced to jail the following March.
In the appeal, Marino told a three-judge panel that Aleynikov had been wrongly convicted.
The highly unusual immediate dismissal of a conviction by the appeals court came in a case that tested... Source/Origin >> Read More
