Senior Counsel Andrew Pilgrim has welcomed the Caribbean Court of Justice’s landmark ruling, quashing a three-month prison sentence imposed on a man convicted of trafficking a small quantity of cannabis.
However, he said he was disappointed the region’s final appeals court stopped short of restricting imprisonment for minor marijuana offences.
“It is a good ruling for us, obviously, but it didn’t go quite as far as I was hoping it would have gone,” Pilgrim said.
Last week, the CCJ unanimously quashed the prison sentence imposed on Danny Lamar Husbands, finding that the offence did not cross the custodial threshold set out in the Penal System Reform Act.
Husbands pleaded guilty to unlawful trafficking of a small quantity of cannabis and was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment.
The CCJ substituted the prison term with a six-month bond to be of good behaviour, with a $675 fine payable in the event of a breach.
The court ruled that both the Magistrates’ Court and the Court of Appeal erred in their application of the Penal System Reform Act by failing to determine whether the offence was so serious that only a custodial sentence could be justified. It also found that the Court of Appeal erred in accepting that the appellant’s previous convictions justified a custodial sentence and by failing to obtain and consider a pre-sentence report before upholding the prison sentence.
The CCJ stressed that sentencing must remain case-specific and declined to establish a blanket rule that all small-scale cannabis trafficking offences should attract non-custodial penalties.
Pilgrim, who represented Husbands along with attorney Martie Garnes at the CCJ, contended that imprisonment should not be imposed for marijuana matters dealt with summarily in the magistrates’ court.
He told Barbados TODAY: “I was making the argument that at magistrate’s court level, incarceration for marijuana charges was entirely inappropriate. In other words, anyone facing a magistrate’s court in any circumstances with a quantity of marijuana that is deemed to be fit for trial in the magistrate’s court ought not to go to prison. In other words, magistrates ought not to be locking up people for marijuana.”
While pleased with the outcome, he said the CCJ stopped short of adopting that broader position, saying: “I think the decision goes close there, but it doesn’t quite reach there.”
Pilgrim also noted the court’s ruling on the importance of pre-sentence reports:
“Of course, it also focuses on the fact that our Court of Appeal, if they intended to continue with the position of incarcerating the young man, they ought obviously to have secured a pre-sentence report before doing so.
“So the decision is still quite important in a lot of ways. But I was hoping it would have gone a little bit further in this time when we consider that marijuana can be a sacrament and that people can make large sums of money off of processing it and so on, and selling it to you with a prescription or with some special card.
“It seemed kind of inappropriate, in my view, that people with small quantities in a magistrate’s court or summary quantities, as we call them, to be still facing imprisonment.”
Pilgrim also noted that Husbands was not at risk of serving the sentence as he had been on bail while the appeal was pending.
(JB)
