Women being targeted as drug ‘mules’
Women with little or no criminal history are being used for drug runs to Christchurch in the hope that they will get lesser sentences if caught, a judge said as she imposed home detention on a mother-of-two.
The 30 year old woman was caught making a drug courier run in August, carrying $50,000 to Auckland and bringing back 50g of the class A drug methamphetamine.
The woman was a mule for an Christchurch offender who could not make the trip himself because he was on electronically monitored bail at the time. Another man was allegedly sent with her on the domestic drug courier trip as a “minder”.
Christchurch District Court Judge Jane Farish today refused the woman final name suppression, but granted interim suppression to protect the fair trial rights of the two men charged, whose cases are being dealt with separately.
Judge Farish said she had noticed a pattern of people dealing in drugs to use women as “mules” who were first offenders or had little criminal history in the belief that they would receive lesser sentences if caught.
“Therefore, punitive sanctions are called for,” she said. She would have to consider whether a home detention sentence was punitive enough for the woman who had pleaded guilty to a charge of possession of methamphetamine for supply.
Defence counsel Elizabeth Bulger said the woman had had to step away from a business she had built up, after being caught for the drugs offending last year. She was a mother of two, who had undertaken rehabilitation since her arrest. She had been in a short relationship with the man who had allegedly asked her to collect the drugs, and had been “the victim of her own circumstances”.
Judge Farish said the woman’s addiction had only lasted eight weeks. She had been introduced to methamphetamine by a business associate who was using it to work longer hours and be more productive. It had put the woman in an incredibly vulnerable position.
She had been frank and co-operative with the police when she was stopped on her way back to Christchurch with the drugs.
The judge said she was able to reduce the sentence because of the woman’s early guilty plea, her steps for rehabilitation, and the fact that the arrest had brought her to her senses about the jeopardy she had brought upon herself and her family.
She described methamphetamine as a highly addictive and insidious drug which caused serious harm within the community.
But she decided she could impose a 12-month home detention sentence – the maximum allowed – with a special condition for the woman to take treatment or counselling for drug addiction as required.
“It’s not over as quickly as you think,” the judge told the woman.
Category: Focus
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