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)
“The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature and an insult to his sense of evidence.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“Even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune, a game of chance, somewhat fixed in the favor of the criminal, that the participants play interminably.”
—Truman Capote (1924–1984)