Supreme Court won’t take case of Dead Sea Scrolls defendant

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court won’t take up the case of a blogger convicted of criminally impersonating his father’s academic rivals on the subject of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The court on Tuesday declined to take the case of Raphael Golb, the son of University of Chicago professor Norman Golb.

The younger Golb was convicted of adopting aliases in derogatory emails and blog posts. That included sending emails that seemed like confessions of plagiarism by one of his father’s key adversaries in a scholarly debate over the scrolls’ origin. The scrolls contain the earliest known versions of portions of the Hebrew Bible.

Golb was sentenced in 2014 to two months in jail after New York’s highest court tossed out some of his convictions.