By JOHN F. BURNS 37 minutes ago
LONDON — April Casburn, a senior police officer with Scotland Yard,
received a 15-month prison term for seeking cash payments from Rupert
Murdoch’s News of the World tabloid.
Published: February 1, 2013
LONDON — A senior police officer in
Scotland Yard’s
counterterrorism command, Detective Chief Inspector April Casburn, was
sentenced to a 15-month prison term on Friday for seeking cash payments
from Rupert Murdoch’s
News of the World tabloid in return for information about a Scotland Yard investigation into
phone hacking at the paper.
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A
unanimous jury verdict after a four-day trial last month made Inspector Casburn, 53, the first person to be convicted of a criminal offense in the
phone hacking scandal, which has enveloped Mr. Murdoch’s newspaper domain in
Britain
for 30 months. The judge told Inspector Casburn that she would have
drawn a three-year term if she did not have a 3-year-old child who was
still moving through the adoption process.
At the trial, the jury was told that evidence implicating Inspector
Casburn was provided to Scotland Yard by an internal investigative unit,
known as the management and standards committee, that was established
by Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation as part of his pledge to give the
police any incriminating information that it came across as it examined
millions of e-mails and other documents relating to the hacking scandal.
A spokesman for Scotland Yard said Inspector Casburn, who continued to
draw her $102,000-a-year police salary during the trial, would now face
an internal dismissal procedure. In a statement issued after her
sentencing, Scotland Yard said Inspector Casburn had “betrayed the
service and let down her colleagues.” It said her prison term “sends a
strong message that the leaking of confidential information for personal
gain is absolutely unacceptable and will not be tolerated.”
Inspector Casburn, who was impassive as the judge pronounced sentence,
had told the court that she had telephoned The News of the World in
September 2010 because she was angry that her superiors had decided to
divert money and resources from counterterrorism operations to the phone
hacking scandal, and thought that she was acting in the public
interest.
At the time, Inspector Casburn was head of the counterterrorism unit’s
financial investigative team, tracking the financing of terrorist
operations. She told the court that as a woman working with a closely
knit group of men, she often felt isolated and excluded, and that her
feelings on that score had contributed to what her lawyer described as a
“mad” and deeply regrettable action.
Crucially, she denied asking for any payment from the newspaper — a
pivotal issue in the case after the jury was told that the reporter who
took the call said in an e-mail to his editors immediately after the
conversation that the officer had asked to be paid for confidential
information about police plans to revive an investigation into phone
hacking that had been halted three years earlier. The e-mail said
Inspector Casburn had named several people who were a target of the
police inquiry.
But the judge, Sir Adrian Fulford, said Friday that Inspector Casburn’s
actions could not be described as “whistle-blowing.” He noted that the
jury had rejected her claim that she had not sought payment, and
described her actions as “a corrupt attempt to make money out of
sensitive and potentially very damaging information.” He added:
“Activity of this kind is deeply damaging to the administration of
criminal justice in this country. We are entitled to expect the very
highest standards of probity from our police officers, particularly
those at a senior level.”
More trials are expected to follow this year as prosecutors work their
way through the cases of more than 90 editors, reporters, investigators
and news executives who have been arrested and questioned in a
wide-ranging investigation that has spread beyond phone hacking to
computer hacking, bribery of public officials and tampering with
evidence, among other forms of wrongdoing.
The scandal has shaken Mr. Murdoch’s global media empire, costing it
hundreds of millions of dollars in legal settlements and other expenses.
It also precipitated a breakup of Mr. Murdoch’s New York-based media
conglomerate, News Corporation, into two companies that will separate
the company’s newspaper holdings, some of them in a financially perilous
state, and its far more lucrative television and film interests.
Revelations about the covert working practices of powerful British
newspapers — mainly at two Murdoch-owned mass-circulation tabloids, the
daily Sun and the Sunday News of the World, which was shuttered by
Mr. Murdoch as the phone hacking scandal burgeoned in 2011 — have also had profound reverberations across
Britain.
A report last year from a public inquiry exposed, in addition to the
widespread newsroom malpractice, a pattern of unhealthily cozy
relationships among Britain’s newspapers, its senior politicians and the
police.
With her sentencing on Friday, Inspector Casburn, one of the most senior
female officers at Scotland Yard, became a totem for others facing
prosecution and possible prison terms. Among them are
Andy Coulson,
a former News of the World editor who went on to become communications
chief for Prime Minister David Cameron before quitting over the scandal;
Rebekah Brooks,
a former Sun and News of the World editor who became Mr. Murdoch’s
handpicked chief executive at News International, the Murdoch newspaper
subsidiary in Britain, before resigning with a multimillion-dollar
buyout; and Charlie Brooks, Ms. Brooks’s husband, who is an Eton College
contemporary and sometime riding companion of Mr. Cameron.
Before the sentencing of Inspector Casburn, the only convictions in the
phone hacking scandal came in 2007, when an earlier police investigation
resulted in jail terms of four months for Clive Goodman, The News of
the World’s royal correspondent, and six months for Glenn Mulcaire, a
private investigator, for their role in hacking into the cellphone
messages of royal family members and their aides.
Their trials brought a three-year hiatus in the Scotland Yard
investigation after prosecutors accepted assurances from the
Murdoch-owned papers that the activities of the two men constituted a
“rogue” operation and that there was no wider pattern of criminal
wrongdoing.
That changed in 2010, when Scotland Yard reopened its investigation,
according to testimony at Inspector Casburn’s trial, on the basis of an
article in The New York Times Magazine
that concluded that there had been a widespread pattern of phone
hacking at The News of the World. Within a week of that article, a
senior Scotland Yard officer, Assistant Commissioner John Yates, was
ordered to review police files. The Casburn jurors were told that she
made her call to The News of the World shortly after Mr. Yates briefed
members of the counterterrorism unit on his plans for the investigation.
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