[JURIST] The US Supreme Court [official website] on Monday denied certiorari [order list, PDF] in appeal brought by Rajat Gupta, the former director of the Goldman Sachs Group Inc, for his 2012 insider trading conviction. The petition [text, PDF] submitted to the Supreme Court argued erroneous utilization of Federal Rule of Evidence 403 and noted a circuit split on jury instructions for character evidence. Gupta appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit [official website] early last year, but his conviction was ultimately upheld [JURIST report]. This is the second time the Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal brought by Gupta, the first being a challenge [JURIST report] to a permanent ban from acting as a public company officer brought January of this year.

Gupta was convicted [JURIST report] on three counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud in June 2012. The convictions rested largely on telephone conversations between Gupta and Raj Rajaratnam [JURIST news archive], head of the Galleon Group hedge fund firm where Gupta disclosed financial and investor information of Goldman Sachs. Gupta was sentenced to two years in prison, one of supervised release, and ordered to pay $5 million dollars in fines. Rajaratnam was convicted in 2011 and sentenced [JURIST reports] to 11 years in prison and $64 million dollars in fines, the largest sentence to ever be awarded for insider trading. Rajaratam appealed to the Second Circuit in 2013, but the conviction was upheld [JURIST report].