Prisons host all sorts of criminals, even doctors. The place is where 49-year-old vascular surgeon Andrew Neil Hopper will spend two-and-a-half years for fraud.
British authorities announced Hopper’s prison sentence on 4 September which stemmed from his conviction for a bizarre crime in which he lost both his legs.
The doctor from the Royal Cornwall Hospital pleaded guilty to falsely claiming 466,000 pounds ($633,000) of insurance payouts in 2019, NBC News reports.
The Crown Prosecution Service said Hopper told the insurance firm that he lost his legs due to sepsis — when he had deliberately frozen them in 44 pounds of ice pellets, which led to injury and the amputation.
Prosecutors said his action was triggered by his need for self-gratification through mutilation. The surgeon had paid to watch amputation videos online, according to NBC News.
Meanwhile, an inmate at the Stillwater Correctional Facility in Bayport, Minnesota, USA was released on 4 September.
Bryan Hooper Sr. was convicted of murdering a 77-year-old woman on 15 April 1998 and was sentenced to life imprisonment with parole after 30 years. However, he was released not because he was eligible for parole.
Hooper was in his 27th year in prison when a key witness to the crime for which he was convicted admitted in July that she was the killer of the old woman, ABC News reports.
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said in a statement that when Chalaka Young confessed to the crime for which Hooper, now 54, was convicted, they worked tirelessly to clear him and secure his release, according to ABC News.
“I am not okay any longer with [an] innocent man sitting in prison for a crime he did not commit,” Hooper’s lawyer quoted Young as saying.
Young is currently serving time at the McRae Women’s Facility in Helena, Georgia on unrelated charges.
