The former features editor of the News of the World has received a four-month sentence suspended for 12 months after admitting he oversaw two years of rampant phone hacking at the Sunday tabloid.
Jules Stenson had pleaded guilty to a conspiracy to intercept voicemails last December but had to wait for sentencing until the end of trial of the paper’s former deputy editor Neil Wallis, who was acquitted of the same charge last week.
The 49-year-old had been charged with involvement in routine hacking of the rich and famous between 2003 and 2007 after one of his reporters, Dan Evans, testified in the Rebekah Brooks trial last year that he hacked phones every day at the paper.
Stenson broke down in tears of relief in the dock as the judge, Mr Justice Saunders, pronounced that “justice would be done” with a suspended sentence.
Stenson was also fined £5,000 and given 200 hours community service. He was also ordered to pay £18,059.61 in costs.
Saunders added that Stenson’s decision to plead guilty “and not to try his luck with a jury demonstrates courage and some remorse for what he has done”.
Outside court Stenson apologised to the victims.
His voice shaking, he said: “I just want to reiterate my apology to victims of hacking. It was wrong and it should never have happened and I have to bear the responsibility for that.”
“I would like to thank the judge for his compassion and in particular would like to apologise to staff at the News of the World, 99% of whom had no involvement in hacking and had their lives severely affected by the action that we, but primarily Andy Coulson, took. They did not deserve that.”
Saunders said: “Stenson’s case, accepted by the prosecution, is that Mr Coulson was the driving force behind the recruitment of Dan Evans, who by his own admission, had been phone hacking at the Sunday Mirror before he went to the News of the World.”
He said it was also Stenson’s case that it was Coulson, who was convicted of phone-hacking offences last year, was indirectly the force behind his decision to commit a crime.
“Mr Stenson’s case is that he allowed himself to be drawn into phone hacking because he was put under pressure to produce stories by Mr Coulson and he was driven to use illegal means in order to avoid the sack,” Saunders said.
Saunders added that phone hacking was a well-established means of getting stories at the news desk of the paper before Stenson became involved. He had heard the rumour, for example, in the office that the paper’s scoop about David Blunkett’s affair had derived from hacking.
“Further the period over which the features department were phone hacking was compariatively short and there was only one person doing it – Dan Evans.”
Prosecutor Julian Christopher QC said there was “widespread hacking being carried out by news desk and Mr Stenson’s attitude was one of ‘if you can’t beat them join them’”.
Saunders was told that Stenson instructed Evans to hack phones when he arrived at the paper from the Sunday Mirror.
“On his first day Mr Stenson gave him a long list of contact numbers to be getting on with, although this did not prove as useful as the list he had brought with him from the Sunday Mirror,” said Christopher.
“In fact Mr Evans would always tell Mr Stenson when information came from phone hacking so he could gauge its reliability.”
He approved expenses for two pay-as-you-go mobile phones and top-up costs, the court was told.
Later Evans started to use the company landline, Christopher said. Records showed that in seven months of 2006 there were “over 120 occasions” in which Evans used the company phone to hack.
Stenson’s barrister, James Hines QC, said his client admitted to being involved in hacking over a 19-month period from January 2005, when Evans started, to August 2006, when the paper’s royal editor Clive Goodman and Glen Mulcaire were arrested for hacking.
Stenson was not involved in the Milly Dowler hacking incident, his barrister told the judge.
His barrister also told the judge that he did not sent an email as Evans claimed advising the reporter to “throw himself off a cliff or a bridge” if he did not come back to work with scoops one weekend.
Hines said Stenson had “no part in the hacking at the News of the World” apart from the 19 months involving Evans.
He said Stenson had been put under pressure by the editor, Andy Coulson, and “felt if he didn’t get involved [in hacking] he feared he would lose his job or be sent to Manchester” or some other satellite department.
In discussion of mitigation factors, Saunders said: “For what it’s worth, I accept that he was under that pressure, but he would have passed that pressure on down.”
In reality only 15 stories “came out of hacking, some of supreme significance” at the features department including a scoop about an alleged affair between Sienna Miller and Bond actor Daniel Craig.
The judge heard that Stenson was a family man with three daughters and that he was full of remorse for his actions.
“He is truly sorry and would wish publically to apologise,” Hines said.
During the 2014 trial it was alleged that in the race to get scoops Stenson was running a hacking operation to compete with that run by the newsdesk and Glen Mulcaire.
Dan Evans, who turned prosecution witness in the Brooks trial, told how Stenson handed him pages of celebrity contacts including numbers for Simon Cowell, Cilla Black and Zoe Ball as soon as he arrived at the News of the World in January 2003.
Evans had told the Brooks trial he was given the numbers “because he wanted me to hack the interesting names on it”.
He said Stenson had told him: “As far as I’m concerned, your USP is the phones, intercepting voicemails. I suggest you fucking well get on with some more.”
At the paper he was given cash to buy pay-as-you-go phones that were nicknamed “burners”. These, he explained at the 2014 trial, were used for “illicit activities” and would be destroyed or “burned” after two to three months.
Asked how often he hacked between his start date on the paper in January 2005 and the arrest of the paper’s then royal editor, Clive Goodman, for hacking-related offences in August 2006, Evans replied: “Probably most days, there might have been the odd lull.”
He was one of two journalists to be charged under the Metropolitan police’s Operation Pinetree.
This was a second investigation into hacking spawned by Evans’s admissions in police interviews ahead of the Brooks hacking trial.
The second journalist, the paper’s deputy editor Neil Wallis, was acquitted by a jury at the Old Bailey last week and branded the prosecution as politically motivated.
Brooks was acquitted of all charges last year.
Stenson’s sentencing brings to eight the number of staff on the paper who were either found guilty or pleaded guilty to being involved in the hacking conspiracy on the paper. These included the editor Andy Coulson, the paper’s chief reporter Neville Thurlbeck, royal editor Clive Goodman and several news desk executives.
(Published by The Guardian - July 6, 2015)