Senior Met Police detective jailed for 15 months over corrupt payments The judge said he would have imposed a three-year sentence if it had not been for the unique circumstances of the adoption. Mr Gibbs claimed the phone call made by Casburn on her way to a Tesco store was not about corruption, "it was about being very unhappy at work and making a mad telephone call." But the judge said he was in no doubt that Casburn's actions were not a case of whistleblowing, but was instead "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 Mrs Casburn would have taken the money and therefore posed a significant threat to the integrity of the investigation. Activities of this kind are deeply damaging to the administration of criminal justice. We are entitled to expect the very highest standards of probity from police officers, particularly those in senior positions. It is a very serious matter indeed that men or women who have all the privileges and responsibility of public office use their position for corrupt purposes. No money changed hands but she revealed the actions of the police and current details of their thinking. That was a truly dire step for a police officer to take. Det Chief Sup Duncan Hall, head of operations at Counter Terrorism Command, said in an impact statement read to the court that counter-terrorist policing is "highly dependent" on the trust and support of the intelligence agencies and if those agencies lost their trust in the police it could affect the flow of intelligence and "undermine public safety." The judge said that in deciding the length of her sentence, he had taken into account the fact that she was in the final stages of adopting a child who had had "a disastrous beginning in life." He said: "The child will continue to have her husband to look after it but the absence of the accused will nonetheless be significant and potentially damaging. These consequences will be mitigated by the fact that if the defendant had not committed the offence she would have been at work and the child would have been dependent on nurseries and relatives during the day. I do not minimise the critical role played by the defendant to date as the principal carer, and in exceptional circumstances such as these the court must consider the impact on the child in the proportionality of any custodial sentence. Bearing in mind all of the facts and circumstances the least sentence I can impose is one of 15 months immediate imprisonment. Casburn did not react when she was told her sentence, but looked up at the public gallery and blew a kiss to her husband as she was led away to the cells below the court. During her trial at Southwark Crown Court last month she had been accused of trying to undermine the phone-hacking inquiry "at the point of its launch" by phoning the newspaper whose former journalists were under suspicion. Casburn had told a reporter that Andy Coulson, the former editor of the News of the World and the then director of communications at Downing Street, was one of four people under investigation. A memo about the conversation which the reporter emailed to his boss said the officer wanted to "sell us inside info" about the hacking investigation. During her trial, Casburn had compared the male-dominated counter-terrorism unit to the TV series Life On Mars. She was not given a desk for several months, despite more junior colleagues having them, but the judge rejected this as an explanation for her behaviour. He said: "It seems to me this is a straightforward but troubling case of corruption. I decline to accept that she had significant difficulties working with her male colleagues in the senior ranks of the counter-terrorism unit, which in part she said led her to act as she did. The most that could be said is that she was a relative newcomer to this area of police work. As a result she may have felt something of an outsider. But he said this "could not begin to explain the actions of a detective chief inspector who offers to the very newspaper which is the subject of a sensitive and confidential investigation by other officers to sell details of the progress of the inquiry and the strategy that officers were intending to follow." Casburn was facing a separate charge under the Official Secrets Act, after she admitted taking confidential documents home with her without authorisation, but the prosecution offered no evidence in that matter today.