Court sentences Ronel Fisher to community service, citing severe investigative failures

The case, filed in 2015, was once described by the prosecution as one of the most serious public corruption scandals in Israel’s history.

In a 146-page sentencing decision, Chief Justice Moshe Sobel sharply criticized the conduct of the Justice Ministry’s Police Investigation Department (PID), which investigates allegations of police misconduct, finding repeated investigative failures, missing evidence, improper witness handling, and misleading representations to the court that ultimately undermined the integrity of the proceedings.

“The cumulative weight of the investigative defects,” Sobel wrote, justified accepting Fisher’s claim of “abuse of process” and departing downward from the standard sentencing range, including refraining from imposing an actual prison term.

Fisher pleaded guilty in August under a revised indictment, after prosecutors withdrew the vast majority of the original charges against him. The original indictment included 51 offenses across 14 counts, alleging a wide-ranging scheme in which Fisher conspired with Eran Malka, then a senior police investigator, to exploit confidential police information in exchange for money.

Under the amended indictment, Fisher was ultimately convicted of five offenses in three incidents, including the Yair Biton affair, the Alon Hassan affair, and the so-called “night meeting” incident.

Sobel noted that after the prosecution completed its case and the defense began presenting evidence, the state concluded that the evidentiary foundation for most of the original indictment, which relied heavily on state witness testimony, was too weak to sustain convictions.

In other incidents, Fisher received classified police materials, warned suspects of impending arrests, and took steps to obstruct investigations, including participating in discussions aimed at coordinating responses after police gained access to suspects’ mobile phones.

DESPITE FINDING Fisher’s conduct criminal and serious, the court devoted substantial portions of the ruling to a detailed critique of the PID’s handling of the case. The judgment cited failures to document key investigative actions, improper recruitment of state witnesses, disappearance of material evidence, and repeated concealment of information from the defense and the court.

Sobel wrote that these failures prolonged the proceedings, required extensive supplemental investigations during the trial itself, and caused significant harm to Fisher’s right to a fair trial. Fisher spent more than two months in custody and over two years under full electronic monitoring based on charges that were later mostly abandoned.

Prosecutors had sought 18 months of imprisonment, while the defense argued for a suspended sentence only. The court initially determined that the appropriate sentencing range for the central bribery-mediation offense was one to two and a half years of prison but ruled that the exceptional investigative misconduct warranted a substantial reduction.

In addition to community service, Fisher was sentenced to a suspended prison term.

Responding to the ruling, attorneys Eli Perry and Amit Hadad, who represent Fisher, said the case had been presented for more than a decade as “the largest corruption affair in the country’s history,” only for that narrative to collapse.

They accused investigators of grave misconduct, arguing that the investigation was conducted negligently and, at times, unlawfully, including the concealment of critical materials, misleading the court and defense, improper recruitment of state witnesses, and a biased inquiry that distorted the truth.

“After a decade of suffering, justice has finally come to light,” they said, adding that the personal and professional damage caused to Fisher over those years could not be undone.

The Public Defender’s Office, which represented Fisher for much of the proceedings, said the case exposed severe failures by law enforcement authorities from the investigative stage through trial management.

Jerusalem District Public Defender Vadim Shosh described the outcome as the result of years of work uncovering systemic flaws that led to extraordinary delays and irreversible harm to the defendant and called for a thorough internal review to prevent similar miscarriages of justice in the future.

The State Attorney’s Office, in its response, emphasized the seriousness of Fisher’s conduct, noting that he acted with others to obstruct police investigations and falsely presented himself as capable of influencing enforcement authorities in exchange for bribes. Prosecutors said they had sought a custodial sentence in light of the harm to the law enforcement system but acknowledged the court’s decision to allow the sentence to be served through community service. The prosecution said it would study the ruling and its reasoning.

The court concluded by urging law enforcement authorities to draw lessons from the case, emphasizing that public confidence in criminal investigations depends not only on convicting offenders but also on scrupulous adherence to legal norms and defendants’ rights.