People v. Golb is a New York case in which Raphael Golb, a lawyer with a Ph.D. in comparative literature, was convicted for a variety of alleged criminal offenses (specifically identity theft, impersonation, aggravated harassment, forgery, and unauthorized use of a computer) relating to his use of pseudonymous blogs and emails to criticize and ridicule several Dead Sea Scrolls scholars.

Norman Golb's opposing view held that the scrolls were written elsewhere and moved to Qumran in anticipation of the Roman siege and destruction of Jerusalem.

[3] In 2008, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences opened a Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit, and invited Bart Ehrman to lecture on the topic.

Golb then created the account larry.schiffman@gmail.com and used it to send emails to four of Schiffman's students with this message and a citation to the "Kaufman" article: Apparently, someone is intent on exposing a minor failing of mine that dates back almost fifteen years ago.

Next Golb sent emails to the university's Provost and the Dean of Graduate Studies, posing as Schiffman and asking them what he could do to counter the charges of plagiarism that the Kaufman article had raised against him.

Golb then sent an email signed "Lawrence Schiffman" to NYU's student newspaper, imploring its staff "not to publish a word" about any plagiarism accusations against him.

[5] Schiffman later testified that he felt "very attacked" by Golb's false emails, "and basically for like a month I couldn't do [any]thing but respond to people's inquiries."

Golb sent an email from seidel.jonathan@gmail.com, signed "Jonathan Seidel", to the museum's board of trustees, stating: The public has the right to know whether the ROM exhibit will indeed present the two basic theories [regarding the origin of the Dead Sea Scrolls] in a scientifically neutral manner ... or if it will rather stick to a "low-keyed assertion of the mainstream view."

Furthermore, the public has a right to know if University of Chicago historian Norman Golb, who is widely considered to have debunked the traditional theory of the Dead Sea Scrolls in his book, will be excluded from participating in the museum's lecture series.Golb later sent the board of trustees two follow-up emails (still posing as Jonathan Seidel), urging them to include Professor Golb's ideas in their lecture series.

"The fact that the underlying dispute between defendant and his father's rivals was a constitutionally-protected debate does not provide any First Amendment protection for acts that were otherwise unlawful."

NY Penal Law § 190.25[1] makes guilty of this crime a person who "impersonates another and does an act in such assumed character with intent to obtain a benefit or to injure or defraud another."

Here, there was sufficient evidence to support the jury's finding that defendant's emails impersonating Schiffman, Seidel and Cross were more than a prank intended to cause temporary embarrassment or discomfiture, and that he acted with intent to do real harm.

The court agreed with Golb that this statute is unconstitutionally vague and overbroad, and that his conviction of three counts of aggravated harassment related to his conduct toward Schiffman, Goranson and Cargill must therefore be vacated.

The court ruled that "any proscription of pure speech must be sharply limited to words which, by their utterance alone, inflict injury or tend naturally to evoke immediate violence.

"[14] New York Penal Law § 170.05 provides "A person is guilty of forgery in the third degree when, with intent to defraud, deceive or injure another, he falsely makes, completes or alters a written instrument."

The court found that there was sufficient evidence to show that defendant deceived people by sending emails from accounts in the names of Schiffman, Seidel and Cross, and accordingly it affirmed his conviction on those counts.

[16] Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman saw no general constitutional impediment to prosecuting conduct similar to defendant's targeting Schiffman as second degree identity theft—"which requires for its proof evidence of intent to cause highly specific injury of a non-reputational sort—but concluded that the particular counts of identity theft with which defendant was charged in the indictment" counts were not sufficiently proved under that standard.

"I, however, part company with the majority as to its dismissal of only some of the indictment's criminal impersonation counts and its determination to leave defendant's third-degree forgery convictions undisturbed.

To treat sock puppetry (or pseudonymous emails) as forgeries "when they are made with some intent to injure in some undefined way is no different than penalizing impersonation in Internet communication for the same amorphous purpose."

The use of the criminal impersonation and forgery statutes now approved amounts to an atavism at odds with the First Amendment and the free and uninhibited exchange of ideas it is meant to foster.

"[28] Count 46 alleged that Golb sent an email purporting to be from Frank Cross to four scholars at the University of North Carolina, where Bart Ehrman worked.

The clear implication of this email was that Ehrman's professional opinions were so off-base that they were embarrassing to Frank Cross, who was a well-known Dead Sea Scrolls scholar.

"[33] Upon remand to the lower criminal court for resentencing, Judge Laura Ward dropped Raphael Golb's prison sentence.

The Appellate Division originally held that because he "was convicted, after a jury trial, of identity theft in the second degree (two counts) in violation of Penal Law § 190.79 (3), a class E felony," he should be disbarred.

"Neither the court nor Eugene recognize that professors sending serious emails don't use gmail accounts, or make outlandish confessions of wrongdoing."

Or more to the point, parody that escapes the technological limits of the judges on the New York Court of Appeals, who failed to appreciate what any slightly astute digital native would have immediately realized, that the emails Golb sent could not be real, is a crime.

The writer asks whether Golb is "really a cybercriminal, or just a particularly noxious partisan in a constitutionally protected academic debate, using guerrilla methods to advance a minority viewpoint?

"[39] A 2012 comment in The Guardian asserted, "The case of Raphael Golb shows the real invasive power and perfidy of sock puppets."

"Tablet asserts that "in recent years a subtle shift has occurred: Golb's theory has begun to approach the status of received wisdom," and "[m]any scholars seem now to be in agreement that some, many, or even most of the scrolls were not of sectarian origin" and came from Jerusalem.

Hayes notes that "the fear of being locked up in prison for a few imprudent words would likely discourage full-throated discussion, debate, criticism and reporting in our society.