Mohammad Amir and Salman Butt have failed to reduce their sentences after the lord chief justice rejected their appeals, telling their legal teams on Wednesday that the pair had been guilty of "criminal conduct of a very serious kind".
Lord Judge led a panel of three appeal court judges, with Mr Justice Royce and Mr Justice Globe beside him, which rejected the two former international cricketers' applications to limit their jail terms.
Butt, the former Pakistan captain, is serving 30 months as the "orchestrator" of the spot fixing during the fourth Test between England and his team at Lord's in August 2010. He was described on Wednesday as a "malign influence" on his team-mates Amir and Mohammad Asif. The latter of the two bowlers who delivered the illegal no-balls in that Test is the subject of a 12-month sentence, and has separately made an application for grounds for appeal against his conviction.
Earlier Ali Bajwa QC, for Butt, had argued that his client's sentence was "out of proportion to the seriousness of the offence that was committed". For the first time Bajwa admitted that Butt had been involved in arranging the no-balls – something that emerged neither in the trial nor in his mitigation-plea hearing – and that this was a criminal offence, but he claimed that spot fixing of individual events was at the "lower end of the scale" of such offences, with result fixing the gravest. Bajwa described Butt as a broken man in a state of "ruin and disgrace".
In claiming that the sentence his client had received was "manifestly excessive", Bajwa drew comparison with sentencing in the MPs' expenses scandal. "There are elements in common," Bajwa said. "Is the criminality more grave than the criminality of MPs and peers involved in the expenses scandal case? That is a very severe breach of trust and undermining of public confidence and there is a need of the court to restore parliament in this case. Putting the matters side by side the offences the courts are concerned with here are, we submit, less serious than in the expenses scandal."
However, the three senior judges reinforced what their high court colleague Mr Justice Cooke had stated in his closing remarks at the trial at Southwark crown court three weeks ago. "These three cricketers betrayed their team, the country they had the honour to represent, the sport that gave them their distinction and all the followers of the game around the world," Lord Judge said.
"What was required of them was that at all times they should give of their best. If for money or any other extraneous reward, this cannot be guaranteed, that he will play as best he may, then all the advantages they enjoyed [which come] from those who watch cricket, whether on television or at the match, will eventually be destroyed.
"The captain was a malign influence on Amir and indeed on Asif. Without him this corruption would not have occurred. His duty as captain in the event of the faintest whiff of corruption was to step in and stop it. The judge said he orchestrated it and it seems to us the judge was fully entitled to reach this conclusion."
Amir, who is serving six months in a young offenders' institution, was found to be "much less culpable" than his captaindue to being 18 years of age at the time of the corrupt activity. But Lord Judge took account of the fact that he "happily took the financial reward" on offer and that when charged by the International Cricket Council he had denied culpability.
"[Amir] can have been in no doubt about the risks and dangers of corruption and how they would be dealt with," Lord Judge said. "It was an elementary part of his education as a Test cricketer. He was not so young that he did not appreciate he was responsible to deliver the no-balls in such a way as the umpire could not miss that he had delivered them.
"From the earliest days that Amir had been playing cricket at the highest level it had been drilled in to him and indeed all of the touring team by the ACSU [anti-corruption and security unit] of the ICC that they should be aware of the dangers and risks of corruption. There can be no doubt they were aware of the seriousness with which corruption would be regarded."
All three had denied the charges brought before the ICC tribunal in Doha last February, headed by Michael Beloff QC.
It handed Butt a 10-year ban from playing or coaching in all forms of organised cricket, with five years suspended. Asif's ban was for seven years, with two suspended, and Amir's was for five years, all of them effective. The players have lodged appeals with the court of arbitration for sport in Lausanne against those convictions. But there was no mistaking that the three judges considered the cricketers to have been guilty of the basest crime a sportsman might commit. Lord Judge said: "It was spot fixing. Three no-balls were bowled, in effect to order. It was a betting scam. They were very well rewarded." -ends
