Appeals
In May 1991, Saunders and his co-accused appealed against their convictions. The guilty verdicts were upheld, though his sentence was halved after medical evidence was produced to suggest he was suffering from a mental illness. Saunders was suggested by doctors at Ford Open Prison possibly to be suffering from premature Alzheimer's disease, a common form of dementia; if this was a correct diagnosis, he made a recovery unique in medical history. Alzheimer's, like all dementias, is usually incurable, being a progressive degenerative disease of the brain. Saunders has since maintained that he must have been depressed. The press presented it as Saunders being deceptive and ridiculed him and the decision to release him.
After work by lawyers for Parnes and Ronson in unearthing material about SFO investigations into other support operations, which they said should have been disclosed before the trial, a second appeal hearing was granted; the appeal court upheld the convictions.
Read more about this topic: Guinness Share-trading Fraud
Famous quotes containing the word appeals:
“The War was decided in the first twenty days of fighting, and all that happened afterwards consisted in battles which, however formidable and devastating, were but desperate and vain appeals against the decision of Fate.”
—Winston Churchill (1874–1965)
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“If tragedy elicits our compassion, comedy appeals to our self-interest. The former confronts life’s failures with noble fortitude, the latter seeks to circumvent them with shrewd nonchalance. The one leaves us momentarily in a mood of resignation, the other in a condition of euphoria.”
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