Two former Canberra housemates found guilty of leaking secret ASIO documents to the media are set to escape full-time jail sentences.
Commonwealth prosecutors were demanding full-time jail for former ASIO officer James Paul Seivers and his housemate Francis Matthew O'Ryan, but after last minute negotiations with defence lawyers in the ACT Supreme Court yesterday agreed not to oppose the two men serving their jail time at weekends. The pair was found guilty in April of conspiring in 2004 to leak sensitive ASIO documents to the media, outlining what the spy agency knew of the terrorist threat to Australians in Indonesia in the lead-up to the 2002 Bali bombings.
It was the second attempt by the Commonwealth to secure a conviction against Seivers and O'Ryan after their first trial, in May last year, ended in a hung jury.
Seivers, who in mid-2003 was a junior member of an ASIO team assigned to provide material to a Senate inquiry into the deadly bombings, handed three documents to O'Ryan, who sent them to The Australian newspaper in October 2004.
The Commonwealth wanted Seivers to go to jail for at least a year and for O'Ryan to serve several months behind bars but agreed in a joint submission to Justice Malcolm Gray that six months' weekend detention for Seivers and three to four months for O'Ryan would be appropriate.
The trial heard the ASIO papers contained intelligence assessments that in the months before the October 2002 attacks, Indonesian Islamist groups were planning attacks on nightclubs frequented by Westerners, which the terrorists dubbed ''sin spots''.
More than 200 people, including 88 Australians, died in the bomb attacks on Paddy's Bar and the Sari Club at Bali's Kuta Beach but two subsequent inquiries found the Howard government was not provided with intelligence that could have been used to prevent the atrocities.
O'Ryan sent the documents to the paper in October 2004 while on a trip to Batemans Bay, paying for the express post envelope with his credit card and leaving a clear trail for investigators to follow.
Through his lawyer James Sabharwal, O'Ryan told his trial that he found the documents in the Canberra home he shared with Seivers and decided to supply them to the press so the public would know the bombings could have been averted.
O'Ryan said he acted alone in taking the papers and supplying them to the newspaper.
But counsel for the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions, Stephen Hall, SC, told the jury records of telephone calls between the two men on the afternoon the documents were sent proved they acted with common purpose.
The two men will appear in court again next week to be formally sentenced.