Ashton's day in court

[Jackie Dooley <jmdooley@sun1.lib.uci.edu>]

I'm forwarding an interesting item from the Archives listserv. Mr. Peter
Kurilecz performs a wonderful service for that list, by the by, in posting
excerpts from news stories relating to archives and records issues. The
Ashton story was the first in today's offerings.

  Jackie M. Dooley, Head of Special Collections and University Archives
UCI Libraries, P.O. Box 19557, Univ. of California, Irvine, CA 92623-9557
   Internet: jmdooley@uci.edu  Phone: 714/824-4935  Fax: 714/824-2472

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 22 Mar 1998 19:46:53 EST
From: PAKURILECZ <PAKURILECZ@aol.com>
Reply-To: Archives & Archivists <ARCHIVES@miamiu.acs.muohio.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list ARCHIVES <ARCHIVES@MIAMIU.ACS.MUOHIO.EDU>
Subject: Records/Archives in the News 03/22/98

There are seven stories in this posting.

New York Times 3/21/98
COURT STRUGGLES WITH VALUE OF MANUSCRIPTS

[others deleted]
____________________________________________________________________

New York Times
March 21, 1998

Court Struggles With Value of Manuscripts

By BENJAMIN WEISER
<SNIP>
NEW YORK -- For more than three hours Friday, Jean Ashton, director of the
rare book and manuscript collection at Columbia University, sat on the witness
stand, pulling on white gloves as she carefully handled old manuscripts,
scrolls and a letter written by George Washington.

In another setting, this might have been a classroom seminar on the history of
bookmaking or early manuscripts. But Ms. Ashton had been summoned to U.S.
District Court in Manhattan to help a judge solve a modern riddle: What is the
proper value of something that is priceless?

The question arose after Daniel Spiegelman pleaded guilty last year to
stealing hundreds of rare and valuable maps and documents from Columbia's
collection. The papers, many of which were destroyed, lost or sold, were an
archival treasure -- original letters of Washington and Lincoln, rare maps
from the 17th century, medieval and Renaissance manuscripts.

Judges once had wide discretion in determining punishments, but under today's
rules of federal sentencing, the dollar value of stolen property is a critical
factor in determining the length of a prison term.

Therefore, when federal prosecutors and Spiegelman's lawyer negotiated a deal
in which he would plead guilty in the theft of the papers, both sides agreed
to $1.3 million as their value, a figure that was supplied by experts. Under
the sentencing charts, that would produce a prison term of about two and a
half to three years.

But in a hearing last year, Judge Lewis Kaplan surprised both sides when he
said he was considering a stiffer sentence on the ground that $1.3 million did
not adequately reflect the magnitude of the crime.

"We are dealing here with unique historical and scholarly resources," Kaplan
said. The crime had hurt not only Columbia but society at large, he said, in a
way that an ordinary theft of money, which can be repaid, does not.

"To sentence your client purely on the basis of somebody's estimate of what
those manuscripts would have brought at Sotheby's, it seems to me, is to
ignore a serious part of the damage he has done," Kaplan said.

Thus began the judge's unusual journey into the world of scribes and monks,
vellum and gilt. "There is a skin side and a hair side" of every leaf of
parchment, Ms. Ashton explained, as Kaplan came down from the bench to examine
a number of the recovered manuscripts.

The judge also received letters from eight scholars in such subjects as art
history and religion, old manuscripts and Islamic studies, who offered their
views.

Simon Schama, the prominent Columbia art and social historian, wrote to the
court: "Such an act has graver implications, I believe, than a theft of other
kinds of property. For in rare book and manuscript libraries lie the artifacts
of our common memory; the documents by which we can reconstruct the life and
culture of our ancestors, and by so doing understand our kinship with them. To
steal or mutilate such works is not only a violation of that kinship, a form
of tomb robbery, it also inflicts a brutal wound on our remembrance."

But Spiegelman's lawyer, H. Elliot Wales, disagreed that there had been a
significant loss to scholars in the case, or that his client deserved a
stiffer term. He wrote that the stolen materials represented only a small
fraction of the university's collection of more than 28 million rare
manuscripts and 500 rare books.

"Multiply that huge number by the considerable number of great depositories of
rare books and manuscripts in the Western world," he wrote, "and we now
realize that we are dealing with astronomical numbers of books and manuscripts
which have been characterized as 'rare' by our scholars and librarians."

"Within that context," he added, "Spiegelman's theft appears like but a single
star in the vast terrain of the Milky Way, discernible only to an MIT
astronomer, with a Hubble telescope."

Little is known about Spiegelman, a slight man who sat quietly Friday, with
his shoulders hunched over, as he listened to the testimony. He was arrested
in 1995, records show, as he tried to peddle two of the manuscripts to a
dealer in the Netherlands. He was found carrying two fake U.S. passports,
driver's licenses from some Caribbean islands, and a fake Columbia University
student identification.

When Spiegelman was arrested, a Columbia curator identified him from a
photograph as someone who had visited the rare book collection frequently the
year before.

Friday, Wales, his lawyer, tried to demonstrate that the loss to scholars was
small because some of the works had been returned, and the library had copies
of others.

But after a federal prosecutor, Katherine Choo, and an FBI agent, Catherine
Begley, lugged over heavy ancient scrolls and documents to Ms. Ashton, she
compared them with the copies, and said there was a big difference.

"Most of the information that is contained in the physical object itself is
absent from the photocopy," she testified about a 15th-century scroll. "The
color, the gilt, the size, the annotations on the side," she said, were all
studied and examined by scholars.

Also displayed was a 13th-century textbook on Euclidean geometry; a
handwritten letter from Washington to John Jay, the first chief justice of the
U.S. Supreme Court, on the day of its opening; a 17th-century atlas from which
more than 250 maps had been removed with a razor, and a late 14th-century
French manuscript, "Roman de la Rose."

When Wales asked how many scholars had wanted to examine the "Roman de la
Rose" since the crime, Ms. Ashton said one person had called every few months.

"So, there's only one scholar," Wales retorted, suggesting that low demand
proved that there had been no great loss to scholarship.

But Ms. Ashton responded: "The book he writes may go to a million people."

Kaplan said that he would consider the issue, and sentence Spiegelman on April
24.
<SNIP>

[rest deleted]

Peter A. Kurilecz CRM, CA
PAKURILECZ@aol.com