A Rio Claro pig farmer who confessed to selling drugs after the police found 21.96 grams of marijuana in his parlour was sentenced yesterday to a year in jail with hard labour. In passing sentence in the San Fernando First Assizes, Justice Hayden St Clair-Douglas said the quantum of drugs was small but the offender had previous convictions for similar offences. He said Jeffrey Sydney, 54, had three marijuana possession convictions, two of which were for trafficking.
Last year, the judge said, Sydney had the “good fortune,” after a similar conviction, to be allowed to pay a fine. Sydney was charged with trafficking not on the basis of the amount but because he confessed to selling the drugs. He pleaded guilty last month. Sydney was arrested at his San Pedro home on September 22, 2007.
The facts, led by state attorney Angelica Teelucksingh, were that around 5.30 am PC Renne Lakhan, along with Cpl Racha and other officers from the Rio Claro Police Station, searched for dangerous drugs at Sydney’s home. Nothing was found. But when they searched the parlour annexed to the house, they found a transparent bag containing the drugs in a stockroom. Sydney told the police: “Boss, that is my parlour. All I does do is sell a lil ten piece. I eh killing nobody.”
In the mitigation plea, attorney Wilston Campbell asked the judge not to send him to jail. He said last year Sydney was fined $50,000 after he was found guilty of a similar offence, and in that matter the amount was almost two kilograms, he said. Since 2007, he said, Sydney had turned his life around and had been attending church. Teelucksingh had said the mitigating factors were that Sydney did not waste the court’s time, and the quantity of drugs involved.
The judge ordered that the sentence would begin from the date of Sydney’s guilty plea, February 28.