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After Appeal, Raphael Golb Gets Jail in NYC Dead Sea Scrolls Case

A man convicted of using digital-age tools to malign his father's academic rivals on the ancient subject of the Dead Sea Scrolls was sentenced.
Image: Raphael Golb enters a courtroom in New York on Sept. 27, 2010
Raphael Golb enters a courtroom in New York on Sept. 27, 2010. Golb, who was convicted in 2010 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 on July 14 to two months in jail. Golb had been sentenced in 2010 to six months in jail but was free on bail during his appeal.Louis Lanzano / AP, file

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 widely used harassment law.

Raphael Golb, a literature scholar and now-disbarred lawyer, was re-sentenced on misdemeanor criminal impersonation and forgery charges that the Court of Appeals upheld, even as it nixed his felony identity-theft conviction and declared an aggravated harassment law unconstitutional.

Golb had been sentenced in 2010 to six months in jail but was free on bail during his appeal. He remains free at least until July 22, as a judge postponed his surrender date so he can ask courts to hold off his jail term while he appeals the case further. The 54-year-old Golb was convicted of adopting aliases in derogatory emails and blog posts — including sending emails that seemed like confessions of plagiarism by one of his father's key adversaries in a scholarly debate over the scrolls' origin.

Image: Raphael Golb enters a courtroom in New York on Sept. 27, 2010
Raphael Golb enters a courtroom in New York on Sept. 27, 2010. Golb, who was convicted in 2010 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 on July 14 to two months in jail. Golb had been sentenced in 2010 to six months in jail but was free on bail during his appeal.Louis Lanzano / AP, file

IN-DEPTH

- The Associated Press