Readers on the harm caused to those who remain incarcerated despite the abolition of IPP sentences in 2012

I am heartened by two pieces on indeterminate sentences that you published last week ( Tommy Nicol was kind and friendly – a beloved brother. Why did he die in prison on a ‘99-year’ sentence?, 24 April ; Editorial, 26 April ). The suicide of Tommy Nicol starkly highlights how unjust imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentences always were and remain (although abolished for new cases 12 years ago). As a former prison chaplain and doctoral researcher into pastoral care for those serving IPP sentences, I witnessed firsthand their impact on the mental wellbeing of those who were, in many cases, life-wounded souls themselves.

Thanks to the Guardian and campaign groups such as the United Group for Reform of IPP, I am hoping that this judicial scandal can achieve the same traction in the public consciousness that the Post Office scandal has. While the Commons justice committee report into IPP sentences in 2022 strongly recommended resentencing those still in custody, MPs on both sides of the house lack the moral courage to take this humane step to right a blatant injustice. Some time ago, as a Labour party member, I wrote to Keir Starmer seeking clarification on his position regarding the IPP scandal. Disappointingly, but unsurprisingly, my epistle was met with silence.

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Coroner condemns ‘inhumane’ imprisonment for public protection sentences that have no end date for release

A senior coroner has condemned the “inhumane” and “indefensible” treatment of a man who killed himself 17 years into an indefinite prison sentence. Tom Osborne, the senior coroner for Milton Keynes, said Scott Rider had given up all hope of release before he took his own life at HMP Woodhill in June 2022.

He had been serving an imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentence after being convicted of grievous bodily harm in 2005. The sentence had a minimum term of 23 months but no end date.

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Judge coroner highlights failings that contributed to three victims being killed by Khairi Saadallah in 2020

The deaths of three people during a terror attack in Reading were avoidable, an inquest has determined.

A judge coroner sitting at the Old Bailey on Friday said failings in intelligence sharing and in providing psychiatric care contributed to the failure to prevent the attack that took the lives of James Furlong, Dr David Wails and Joseph Ritchie-Bennett in June 2020.

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Tom, whose experience reflects that portrayed in Baby Reindeer, talks about how things developed, its affect on him and the police response

Not long after he embarked on an on/off dalliance with a former colleague, Tom began feeling uneasy about her behaviour. Heended things – but that only made matters worse.

Lies and gaslighting turned into his ex turning up randomly at places where he hung out and “appearing seemingly everywhere I went”, he said. “That was incredibly hard to deal with. I felt hounded, and I had no idea what to do.”

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Ahmed Alid told police he was motivated to kill Terence Carney, 70, ‘because Israel was killing children’

A 45-year-old man has been found guilty of murdering a complete stranger, telling police he wanted to kill people because of the conflict in Gaza.

A court heard that Ahmed Alid told detectives that he wanted “Palestine to be free from the Zionists” and that he had killed “because Israel was killing children”. In interviews, he said that if he had had a machine gun or more weapons, he would have killed more people.

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The co-founder of Silicon Valley-based software testing startup HeadSpin was sentenced Friday to 18 months in prison and a $1 million fine, reports SFGate — for defrauding investors. Lachwani pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud and a count of securities fraud in April 2023, after federal prosecutors accused him of, for years, lying to investors about HeadSpin's finances to raise more money. HeadSpin, founded in 2015, grew to a $1.1 billion valuation by 2020 with over $115 million in funding from investors including Google Ventures and Iconiq Capital... He had personally altered invoices, lied to the company accountant and sent slide decks with fraudulent information to investors, [according to the government's 2021 criminal complaint]... Breyer, per the New York Times, rejected Lachwani's lawyer's argument that because HeadSpin investors didn't end up losing money, he should receive a light sentence. The judge, who often oversees tech industry cases, reportedly said: "If you win, there are no serious consequences — that simply can't be the law." Still, the sentencing was far lighter than it could have been. The government's prosecuting attorneys had asked for a five-year prison term. The New York Times reported in December that HeadSpin's financial statements had "often arrived months late, if at all, investors said in legal declarations," while the company's financial department "consisted of one external accountant who worked mostly from home using QuickBooks." And the comnpany also had no human resources department or organizational chart... After Manish Lachwani founded the Silicon Valley software start-up HeadSpin in 2015, he inflated the company's revenue numbers by nearly fourfold and falsely claimed that firms including Apple and American Express were customers. He showed a profit where there were losses. He used HeadSpin's cash to make risky trades on tech stocks. And he created fake invoices to cover it all up. What was especially breathtaking was how easily Mr. Lachwani, now 48, pulled all that off... [HeadSpin] had no chief financial officer, had no human resources department and was never audited. Mr. Lachwani used that lack of oversight to paint a rosier picture of HeadSpin's growth. Even though its main investors knew the start-up's financials were not accurate, according to Mr. Lachwani's lawyers, they chose to invest anyway, eventually propelling HeadSpin to a $1.1 billion valuation in 2020. When the investors pushed Mr. Lachwani to add a chief financial officer and share more details about the company's finances, he simply brushed them off. These details emerged this month in filings in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California after Mr. Lachwani had pleaded guilty to three counts of fraud in April... The absence of controls at HeadSpin is part of an increasingly noticeable pattern at Silicon Valley start-ups that have run into trouble. Over the past decade, investors in tech start-ups were so eager to back hot companies that many often overlooked reckless behavior and gave up key controls like board seats, all in the service of fast growth and disruption. Then when founders took the ethos of "fake it till you make it" too far, their investors were often unaware or helpless... Now, amid a start-up shakeout, more frauds have started coming to light. The founder of the college aid company Frank has been charged, the internet connectivity start-up Cloudbrink has been sued, and the social media app IRL has been investigated and sued. Last month, Mike Rothenberg, a Silicon Valley investor, was found guilty on 21 counts of fraud and money laundering. On Monday, Trevor Milton, founder of the electric vehicle company Nikola, was sentenced to four years in prison for lying about Nikola's technological capabilities. The Times points out that similarly, FTX only had a three-person board "with barely any influence over the company, tracked its finances on QuickBooks and used a small, little-known accounting firm." And that Theranos had no financial audits for six years.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lying to Investors? Co-Founder of Startup 'HeadSpin' Gets 18-Month Prison Sentence for Fraud

Paolo Barone found guilty of voyeurism after taking photos of sleeping woman on train to St Albans in 2022

A Thameslink train driver who took photos up a woman’s skirt while she was asleep on a train has avoided jail, despite being found guilty of voyeurism.

The driver, Paolo Barone, was on his way home from a shift in September 2022 when he saw that the woman, 51, had fallen asleep on a train travelling from London Blackfriars to St Albans in Hertfordshire.

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Gabriel Marinoaica, 20, dragged victim, who could not swim, out of her depth and attacked her

A man who raped a 15-year-old girl who could not swim after taking her out of her depth in the sea off Bournemouth beach has been sentenced to six and a half years’ detention.

Gabriel Marinoaica, who was 18 at the time, grabbed the girl as she played a game of catch with her friends and dragged her off the crowded beach into a water.

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Orlando Whitfield was a student when he became best friends with Inigo Philbrick, ‘the art world’s Bernie Madoff’. He talks about how their decade of hustling would lead one to a breakdown – and the other to jail

• ‘The day we tried to bag a Banksy’: read an extract from Whitfield’s explosive exposé

Orlando Whitfield is a youngish man, shy, with a reddish beard. His hands are aggressively tattooed, as if they’d been laid, backs down, on wet newspaper. The ink is a form of armour, he says, like his pranking brand of humour (for a while his iCloud hotspot was “Lord Lucan’s iPhone”). But he’s earnest, too, quick to draw on a literary quotation. Today he has arrived at lunch apologetic and soaked through, having been caught on his bike in a downpour.

We’ve met at the Academy Club – his choice – an old-timers’ haunt in Soho, London, with black oilcloths on tables and stained wainscotting. “Hogarth’s dining room,” he calls it. We’re here to discuss his former best friend Inigo Philbrick , the London-based American art dealer who swindled friends, business associates, investors and collectors out of millions of dollars before going on the run in 2019. Philbrick, 36, was jailed in 2020. In 2022 he was sentenced to seven years for wire fraud and ordered to forfeit $86m (£68m). A stunned art world is still puzzling over how he pulled off this heist. The maître d’ brings a fan heater to dry Whitfield’s jeans.

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