Judge Jed S. Rakoff asked a law student attending the insider trading trial of Rajat K. Gupta to stop sending him letters about the case.
During a break in the proceedings on Wednesday morning, a courtroom deputy asked Benula Bensam, a student at Benjamin M. Cardozo Law School, to participate in a private conference with Judge Rakoff and the lawyers.
It was unclear what the brief discussion was about, but in an interview outside of the courthouse, Ms. Bensam explained.
Ms. Bensam has been attending the trial of Mr. Gupta, who is accused of leaking corporate secrets about Goldman Sachs and Procter & Gamble to the former hedge fund titan Raj Rajaratnam.
She had taken a class in the federal rules of evidence this semester, and thought it would be interesting to attend a white-collar criminal trial. Besides, she said, she hadn’t landed a summer job, so watching the case would be a productive use of her time.
“I’m an optimistic person, and if you can’t get an education in one respect, there are other things to do,” Ms. Bensam said.
Ms. Bensam said that she had sent three letters to Judge Rakoff about various evidentiary rulings that he had made in the case, posing questions about some and disagreeing with others.
On Monday afternoon, as the jury listened to testimony from Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, a United States marshal approached Ms. Bensam in the spectator’s gallery and asked her to leave the courtroom. She said that several marshals then took her into a room and accused her to trying to improperly influence the judge.
“That was certainly not my intention,” said Ms. Bensam, who lives in Woodside, Queens. “They were very aggressive and totally misconstrued what I was trying to do.”
During the sidebar with Judge Rakoff and the lawyers on Wednesday, Ms. Bensam said that the judge politely told her that she should not write him any more notes because it could create the perception that she was trying to influence the outcome of the case.
“I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong,” she said. “But now I know.”
Wednesday morning’s testimony was uneventful, with the government using witnesses to introduce dozens of documents into evidence. As the court broke for lunch, Judge Rakoff described the session as “excruciating.”