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 earlier this month made Ms. Casburn, 53, the first person to be convicted of a criminal offense in the phone hacking scandal that has enveloped Mr. Murdoch’s newspaper domain in Britain over the last 30 months. The judge told Ms. Casburn that she would have drawn a three-year term if she were not in the process of adopting a child.
At the trial, the jury was told that evidence implicating Ms. Casburn was provided to Scotland Yard by an internal investigative unit established by Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation, known as the management and standards committee, which was started as part of Mr. Murdoch’s pledge in 2011 that his company would give the police any incriminating information that it came across as it trawled through millions of e-mails and other documents relating to the hacking scandal.
Ms. Casburn, who was impassive as the judge pronounced sentence, had told the court that she had telephoned The News of the World 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, Detective Casburn, who had previously worked in the world of private finance, 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 she described as a “mad” and deeply regrettable action in calling the tabloid.
Crucially, she denied asking for any payment from the newspaper — a pivotal issue in the case after the jury was told that the News of the World reporter who took the call wrote an e-mail to his editors immediately after the conversation saying 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 that Ms. Casburn had named several individuals who were a target of the police inquiry.
But the judge, Sir Adrian Fulford, said that Ms. 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, “If The News of the World had accepted her offer, it’s clear, in my view, that Ms. Casburn would have taken the money, and, as a result, she posed a significant threat to the integrity of this important police investigation.”
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 costs. It also precipitated a breakup of Mr. Murdoch’s media conglomerate, News Corporation, based in New York, 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. The report late last year of a public inquiry led by a high court judge, Sir Brian Leveson, exposed, in addition to the widespread newsroom malpractice, a pattern of unhealthily cozy relationships between Britain’s newspapers, its senior politicians, and the police.
With her sentencing on Friday, Ms. Casburn, one of the most senior female officers at Scotland Yard, became a totem for others facing prosecution and possible jail terms at trials later this year. 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 Ms. Casburn, the only convictions in the phone hacking upheaval 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, 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 at the tabloids.
That changed in 2010, when Scotland Yard reopened its investigation, Ms. Casburn’s trial was told, on the basis of an article in The New York Times 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.
