Anat Kamm appeals prison sentence to Supreme Court
In her appeal, Kamm asks the court to delay the start of her prison term, saying the sentence was disproportionate.
By JPOST.COM STAFF, JOANNA PARASZCZCUKAnat Kamm stands inside a courtroom in Tel Aviv 311 (R)(photo credit: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun)Anat Kamm filed an appeal in the Supreme Court Wednesday against her prison sentence. Kamm was convicted of passing classified documents during her army service to a reporter and handed a 4.5-year prison sentence.Kamm claimed in her appeal that the punishment given to her by the court was disproportionate and asked to delay the start of her prison term. The court was expected to discuss the delay on Thursday.RELATED:Anat Kamm gets 4.5 years for stealing military documents Sides argue over Kamm sentencing behind closed doors Kamm, now aged 24, and who worked as a journalist after her army service for the Walla news portal, was convicted in February in a plea bargain under which she pleaded guilty to gathering and storing more than 2,000 classified military documents during her mandatory army service.
She also admitted to transferring the classified documents to Blau, a political affairs reporter for Haaretz, who used the classified material as the basis for two articles in late 2008.However, the amended indictment dropped two far more severe charges of deliberately intending to harm state security, offenses carrying a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.In her sentencing hearing, the panel of judges, Nurit Ahituv, Miriam Diskin and Ra’anan Ben-Yosef, said Kamm had “cynically exploited her position” during her army service as a clerk in the office of Maj.-Gen. Yair Naveh in the capital’s Neveh Ya’acov neighborhood to steal 2,085 IDF documents, including more than 700 classified ones, for ideological reasons and for future publication.Before Sunday’s court session began, Kamm smiled, sipped coffee, checked her cellphone and chatted with her parents, who had accompanied her to court.During the hearing, however, Kamm sat alone in the dock with her head bowed low, retaining her composure as Ahituv criticized her actions in copying and stealing the classified files. Only when the judges pronounced Kamm’s 54-month prison sentence did she appear to flinch, but she quickly composed herself, and remained impassive and silent.Kamm’s parents also seemed calm during the hearing, as they watched their daughter from the public gallery. After the sentence was pronounced, however, Kamm’s father, Yigal, appeared visibly shaken and left the court without speaking to reporters.Before passing sentence, the judges noted that in September 2008, after her discharge from the army, Kamm intended to give the files she had gathered to a Yediot Aharonot reporter, but when that failed, she handed a disc containing 1,500 documents, 150 of them marked as highly classified and 330 as classified, to Blau.Blau used the classified material as the basis for two articles for Haaretz. In the first, published in October 2008, Blau accused the IDF of defying a High Court of Justice ruling against the targeted killings of Palestinian terrorists.The next article, published a few weeks later, similarly intimated that the IDF had earmarked Palestinian terrorists for targeted killings, and included a photocopy of a targeted-killing order Kamm had given Blau.
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