Spot-fixing case: Butt and Amir lose appeals against jail terms

The Court of Appeal dismissed their appeals at a hearing in London.

LONDON: Disgraced Pakistan players Salman Butt and Mohammad Amir will serve their full terms of 30 months and six months respectively, after they lost their appeals against their sentences for spot-fixing on Wednesday.

The players, however, will still be released from prison after half their sentences on licence.

Lord Chief Justice Igor Judge had little time for the duo during the appeal, saying their “notorious case” was a “carefully prepared” conspiracy which merited “criminal sanction.”

The pair were not present at the Court of Appeal in London for the hearing before Lord Judge, the head of the English judiciary, and two other judges. They dismissed the appeals in which Butt’s lawyer argued that the former skipper’s sentence was “manifestly excessive”, and Amir’s lawyer urged the court to suspend his sentence.

In a scandal that shook the sport, Butt, Amir and fast bowler Mohammad Asif were all jailed for their parts in fixing elements of the August 2010 Test match against England at Lord’s. Their British agent Mazhar Majeed was also jailed.

Lord Judge said the conspiracy “was not set up on the spur of the moment and it was not the result of some temptation to which either appellant succumbed, in effect, on the spur of the moment. “These three cricketers betrayed their team, they betrayed the country which they had the honour to represent and betrayed the sport that had given them their distinction – and of course betrayed all the very many followers of the game throughout the world.”

He said the court had to make clear that what the cricketers did was “not simply a matter of breaking the rules of the game” and therefore subject to internal discipline and regulation. “It is also criminal conduct of a very serious kind which must be marked with a criminal sanction,” he said.

Butt’s lawyer Ali Bajwa had argued that the former captain’s sentence was “out of proportion to the seriousness of the offence that was committed.” Although serious, it was at the “lower end of the scale” of such offences, Bajwa argued, while also describing Butt as a broken man in a state of “ruin and disgrace.”

Amir’s lawyer Henry Blaxland had urged the judges to impose a suspended sentence of a length that would enable his immediate release. The judge accepted that Amir was young and impressionable, but still did not waver from the initial judgment.

“The situation for Amir was much less culpable,” said Lord Judge. “But we cannot give the view that it was extinguished. He was open to the malignant influence of Butt, but he can have been in no doubt about the risks and dangers of corruption, and how they would be dealt with. It was an elementary part of his education as a Test cricketer.”

Published in The Express Tribune, November 24^th, 2011.