Convicted technology consultant Peter MacDonald was sentenced to six weekends in jail, five years' probation, 100 hours of community service and $35,000 in damages last week for computer-related crimes against his former employer, Leon Henry Inc., Scarsdale, NY.
“We're happy that it's over, and we're happy with the way it worked out,” said Leon Henry, chairman/CEO of Leon Henry Inc., a list and insert management and brokerage firm. “From our perspective, we think it's very important that people know that things like this do happen.”
State Supreme Court Justice Daniel Angiolillo, who found MacDonald guilty of grand larceny, computer tampering and falsifying business records in June after a four-day nonjury trial in White Plains, NY, imposed the sentence.
MacDonald was convicted of placing two programs in Leon Henry Inc.'s computer system that caused accounts payable records to be deleted. The first “time bomb” went off in April 1997, resulting in a loss of about $24,000, Henry said. The second, which struck in November 1998, caused an additional $10,500 in damage.
Henry hired MacDonald in the mid-'80s to develop a custom system for the billing of package insert programs.
Direct marketing software packages did not exist at that time, Henry said.
