The Supreme Court on Monday took a year off the four-and-a-half-year sentence
begun in November 2011 by Anat Kamm, 25, reducing her jail term to
three-and-a-half years.
Kamm was convicted by the Tel Aviv District Court
in February 2011 of stealing IDF documents during her mandatory military service
and leaking them to Haaretz journalist Uri Blau.
Kamm, who worked as a
journalist for the Walla news portal after her army service, was convicted in a
plea bargain under which she admitted to gathering and storing more than 2,000
classified military documents during her service.
She also admitted to
transferring the classified documents to Blau, a political affairs reporter who
used the material as the basis for two articles, including allegations that
certain IDF commanders had disregarded Supreme Court directives in late
2008.
She is now expected to be released from Ramle’s Neveh Tirza Prison
in February 2014.
The court based its decision on the fact that Kamm
admitted to her crimes, saved the court time, cooperated with police
investigators and was unlikely to commit such crimes again. It also found that
her sentence was harsher than those given to others for similar crimes, and that
it was unreasonable given that Blau had been sentenced to only four months of
community service for his part in the affair.
However, the court agreed
with the lower court in that Kamm’s actions had been highly problematic and a
strong message of deterrence had to be sent to ideologically motivated people
who believe they know better than the authorities and are ready to take the law
into their own hands.
The court did not find Kamm’s sentence or the fact
that she was given significant jail time to be inappropriate.
More
specifically, it responded to the argument put forward by her attorney that
because of her relatively low rank at the time she stole the documents, her
sentence should have been be less than that given to a former general, Yitzhak
Yaakov, who also leaked classified information.
The court said Kamm had
pushed harder and succeeded more than Yaakov in getting the classified documents
into the hands of the media, and created greater dangers for the IDF. In fact,
it said it would not have reduced her sentence based only on a comparison with
other cases, but since it already had a core problem with the sentence,
comparisons to other sentences provided additional evidence that hers was
harsher than necessary.
While the court said Kamm’s sentence was
unreasonable when compared to Blau’s, it refused to make any exact comparisons.
It noted that Blau had a legally privileged role as a journalist, whereas Kamm,
a soldier, had an extra responsibility to uphold considerations of
security.
The fact that Kamm might have seen her role as similar to
Blau’s was not an overwhelming factor for the court, although it did believe it
somewhat unreasonable that the lower court had entirely ignored Kamm’s intent to
benefit the public.
Overall, the court affirmed the lower court’s
sentencing of Kamm.