A 35-YEAR-OLD man has been jailed for 18 months for dealing cannabis.
Christopher John Cornick was sentenced at the Royal Court yesterday after being found with hundreds of grams of the class B drug and messages on his phone which indicated that he had been involved in selling another 2½ kilos over a two-year period.
Crown Advocate Chris Baglin, prosecuting, told the court that on 16 July last year States police officers searched Cornick’s property, where they found 363g of herbal cannabis, 52g of cannabis resin, 2.97g of medicinal cannabis, £3,630 in cash and a list containing the names of people he dealt to.
When arrested, Cornick gave officers the pin code to his phone. Messages on the device revealed that he was a ‘mid-market wholesale dealer and a street dealer’ who had been in contact with another dealer in the UK and the pair were planning to bring cannabis from there to Jersey to sell for a profit, Crown Advocate Baglin said.
The court also heard that Cornick had said that he could sell ‘800g in three weeks’.
It was revealed that he had previous drugs convictions from ten years ago – for which he was given a probation order and community service. However, he breached that order and was sentenced to 11 months imprisonment.
Advocate Luke Sette, defending, asked the court to impose a community service order, rather than a custodial sentence, on the basis that Cornick had shown a ‘refreshing level of co-operation’ and was the sole carer for his grandmother, who described him as her ‘right arm’.
The court heard that Cornick had suffered a number of personal losses, including the death of his father in 2011, his son, who died minutes after birth in 2016, and his mother last year – all of which had contributed to his depression and anxiety, for which he was prescribed medicinal cannabis.
Also put forward in mitigation was Cornick’s early guilty pleas and his full co-operation with the authorities, which included giving officers the pin code to his phone, which Advocate Sette explained was ‘crucial’ in the case against his client.
Delivering the court’s sentence, Lieutenant-Bailiff Anthony Olsen, presiding, said that the ‘court cannot be confident you won’t breach its trust again’, which meant that a custodial sentence was inevitable.
He added that the court ‘had not given up’ on him and urged Cornick to take advantage of the training and treatment available in prison.
Jurats Jerry Ramsden and Robert Christensen were sitting.
Commenting on the case, Detective Sergeant Jim McGranahan, who heads the States police drug squad, said: ‘2022 has so far kept the drug squad very busy and we continue to work with our partner agencies to keep illegal drugs off our Island’s streets and bring those offenders before the courts.’
