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Cocaine smuggler must serve full term, Appeal Court rules
A BUS driver from Islington jailed for 12 years for his part in a plot to smuggle cocaine worth £3 million into the UK from Panama by hiding the drugs in ornate wooden doors has failed to get his sentence reduced by the Appeal Court.
Johnny Edisson Mejia, from Essex Road, was handed the sentence at Inner London Crown Court last July after admitting conspiracy to supply Class A drugs.
To import the drugs into the UK, smugglers laced fibreboard with cocaine and hid it inside heavy ornate furniture. When it arrived in Britain, the job to dismantle the illicit cargo fell to Mejia.
The brains behind the operation, Paul Sneath, of Guildford, Surrey, was jailed for 18 years after being convicted of the same offence in a trial before a jury, while three London-based Colombians also received long prison sentences.
It had been Sneath’s idea to invest an inheritance in cocaine and smuggle it into the country by treating the fibreboard with the drug. The technique left the cocaine virtually undetectable.
Detectives caught members of the gang red-handed as they used a circular saw to chop up one of the doors in a lock-u p in Dalston, east London, in March 2006.
When police inspected the fibreboard, they discovered 17 kilos of 100 per cent pure cocaine, with an estimated street value of more than £3 million.
Mejia, 26, admitted his involvement on the basis that he had been the caretaker of the premises where the furniture was to be stored and had only become aware of the drugs conspiracy after he had become involved.
He said he had constructed the area of the warehouse where the doors were to be taken apart and the cocaine extracted for selling on.
The Crown Court judge accepted that Sneath was the person who had devised the “professional and sophisticated scheme”, but said Mejia was also a leader of the organisation.
On Tuesday, lawyers representing Mejia at London’s Criminal Appeal Court urged three top judges to reduce his sentence, arguing that he had been too harshly treated in comparison to Sneath.
Since Mejia had pleaded guilty and thus received a one-third reduction in his sentence, the Crown Court judge must have sentenced him to 18 years, the same as Sneath, who, the lawyers argued, was more
culpable.
But in dismissing the appeal, Lord Justice Latham, who sat today with Mr Justice Henriques and Mr Justice Grigson, said: “We have concluded that the judge was, in this case, in the best possible position to determine the respective roles that were played by the various conspirators.
“He had before him a basis of plea which the Crown did not accept and was accordingly in no way bound to accept himself.
“The extent to which he took account of the matters within it was a matter for himself.
“We cannot say that this sentence was either wrong in principle or manifestly excessive.” |
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