A cannabis grower busted with a $50,000 crop and a sawn-off shotgun will remain behind bars.
Simon Gillan (37) was jailed for 26 months when he appeared in the Dunedin District Court in June but appealed to the High Court, claiming it should have been home detention.
Justice David Gendall released his decision this week rejecting the appeal, ruling the outcome was not manifestly excessive.
Gillan’s Mosgiel home was raided by police in September last year, which revealed an illicit operation behind the legitimate car-painting business at the Factory Rd address. Two weeks of police surveillance found four sales to two customers, which netted the defendant $1100.
But it did not represent the scale of the set-up inside.
“The cannabis operation was conducted in two carefully adapted grow rooms, which included, significantly, sophisticated hydration systems and CCTV monitoring,” Justice Gendall said.
“These ongoing arrangements, which involved cultivation of significant quantities of cannabis, in my view, take the apparent commerciality of these circumstances to another level. As I see it, there is no question that Mr Gillan was involved in dealing in cannabis, it seems, at least in part to fund a methamphetamine habit.”
Plants at the house were labelled according to strains, “B Berry”, “Big Kush”, “Critical” and “PB Playboy” being among them, the court heard at sentencing. The projected yield could have netted the defendant nearly $46,000, police calculated.
Inside a reusable shopping bag officers also found a sawn-off .22 firearm loaded with a single round, which Gillan said was for protection after a gang heard about his dealing.
Counsel Sarah Saunderson-Warner said the cultivation was primarily to service her client’s drug addiction, pointing to the limited sales as evidence of that.
Gillan was also behind on rent and his business had been adversely affected by the Covid-19 lockdown, she said.
While he acknowledged the sentence for the drug offending was “perhaps at the higher end”, the other calculations made by the sentencing judge were appropriate, Justice Gendall said.
