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| News of World features editor sentenced over hacking | News of World features editor sentenced over hacking |
| (34 minutes later) | |
| News of the World features editor Jules Stenson has been given a four-month suspended jail sentence for his part in the phone-hacking scandal. | News of the World features editor Jules Stenson has been given a four-month suspended jail sentence for his part in the phone-hacking scandal. |
| Stenson, 49, from Battersea, south west London, pleaded guilty in December 2014 to plotting to hack phones. | |
| He is the ninth journalist from the Sunday tabloid to be convicted for phone hacking. | He is the ninth journalist from the Sunday tabloid to be convicted for phone hacking. |
| Mr Justice Saunders also sentenced him to 200 hours of community service and ordered him to pay £18,000 legal costs. | Mr Justice Saunders also sentenced him to 200 hours of community service and ordered him to pay £18,000 legal costs. |
| The court also ordered him to pay a £5,000 fine. | The court also ordered him to pay a £5,000 fine. |
| Stenson was charged with plotting to hack phones between 1 January 2003 and 26 January 2007. | |
| The court heard that hacking was widespread in the newsroom for years before Stenson, under pressure from the editor Andy Coulson, brought it to the features department. | |
| Stenson helped recruit the hacker Dan Evans to The News of the World from the Sunday Mirror, said prosecutor Julian Christopher QC. | |
| 'Intense competition' | |
| Both the former editor of the News of the World Andy Coulson and Stenson were at a breakfast meeting with Evans when they discussed phone hacking, said Mr Christopher. | |
| Mr Christopher added that there was intense competition between the news and features desks and Stenson took the attitude "if you can't beat them join them". | |
| The celebrities whose phones were hacked included actress Sienna Miller, TV personality Jade Goody, footballers Sol Campbell and Steven Gerrard, manager Sven-Goran Eriksson and boxer Mir Khan. | |
| Stenson's lawyer, James Hines QC, called for a suspended sentence as his client had been put under intense pressure by Andy Coulson. | |
| Mr Hines said that while phone-hacking was prolific, the features hacking operation was nowhere near "the industrial scale" of the news department. | |
| Stenson broke down in the dock when he heard he would not be going to jail and thanked the judge before he left court. | |
| Outside, he apologised to the victims saying: "It was wrong and it should never have happened". | |
| Evans was given a 10-month jail sentence suspended for a year for two counts of phone hacking and making illegal payments to officials at the Old Bailey in July 2014. | |
| He was a prosecution witness against his former editor Andy Coulson in the hacking trial. |