NEW YORK — A New York jury convicted a Texas college professor on Tuesday of criminal possession of items that were owned by the late classical pianist Glenn Gould and were stolen from Canada's national library.
The jury, after a three-day trial in Manhattan's state Supreme Court, convicted Barbara Moore, 62, of Austin, on two misdemeanour counts of criminal possession of stolen property.
The pilfered items, which prosecutors called Canada's “national treasures,” included a page with Mr. Gould's signature written 18 times and a page containing an outline for a musical composition depicting sounds of sea, wind and gulls.
Jurors, some of whom said the verdict was a compromise after 12 hours of deliberations over two days, acquitted Ms. Moore of stealing the items from the Canadian Library and Archives in Ottawa, as prosecutors said she had.
Ms. Moore also was found not guilty of any of the felonies for which she was indicted. Those charges were third-degree criminal possession of stolen property, fourth-degree grand larceny and third-degree attempted grand larceny.
Ms. Moore's lawyer, Shane Michael Brooks, called the verdict “a huge victory.”
“They exonerated her completely of the larceny,” Mr. Brooks said. “They convicted her of the lowest possible thing they could have convicted her of.”
Ms. Moore faces up to a year in jail, but Mr. Brooks said that because she had never been arrested before and because of her age he will ask for probation.
State Supreme Court Justice James Yates, who allowed Ms. Moore to remain free on $5,000 bail, scheduled her sentencing for Dec. 13.
One juror, Marty New, a documentary filmmaker, said she voted to convict Ms. Moore of the felony charges.
“I believed she knowingly took the items and put a forgery in its place,” Ms. New said. “She was trying to get away with something. She was a smart woman. She knew what she was doing.”
Ms. New said that although virtually all the jurors believed Ms. Moore was guilty, they wanted to acquit her of everything, but she and another held out.
“This was very much a compromise verdict,” she said.
Juror Gustav Seliger, a radiologist, agreed that the verdict was a compromise. He said many jurors thought Ms. Moore was guilty but the prosecutors had not proved their case.
Mr. Seliger said he had voted to convict on the more serious charges because he doubted that the library's archive curator had freely given Moore the Gould items, as she had claimed.
Mr. Gould was born Sept. 25, 1932, into a musical family in Toronto. His father was a violinist, his mother a pianist, and his only teacher until he was 10 was a relative of Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg. He died in 1982 at age 50. His most famous recordings include his interpretation of Bach's Goldberg Variations.
Ms. Moore, working at Austin Community College when arrested, attracted attention after she sold some Gould items to a New York dealer in December 2004.
In December 2005, an author and Gould researcher in Victoria, British Columbia, told Canadian officials that a Manhattan dealer who specialized in musicians' memorabilia had posted a Gould item for sale on the Internet.
In January 2006, Canadian library officials contacted the New York Police Department's Cyber Crimes Unit, which recovered the stolen items and referred the case to the Manhattan district attorney's office.
