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.
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.
