STATE OF TASMANIA v RONALD CURTAIN 24 MARCH 2023
COMMENTS ON PASSING SENTENCE BRETT J
Mr Curtain, you have pleaded guilty to one count of the major offence of cultivating cannabis for sale.
Between October 2021 and January 2022, you decided to involve yourself in the business of cultivating this cannabis. You did so at three separate sites, one of which was in the backyard of your home and the other two were bush blocks. You were growing in total 106 cannabis plants across the three sites. It seems that the cultivation was relatively rudimentary. You were supplied with the seeds and given some basic information on how to cultivate the plants by a family member. Your expenditure on infrastructure for the cultivation was modest. You protected the bush plantations by simple fences constructed from star pickets and chicken wire, and you did all of the work involved in the cultivation yourself. As your record shows, you have not involved yourself in this type of activity before, and in fact you have no prior convictions at all for drug related offending. You were doing this solely for commercial purposes, that is to sell the cannabis for money. You told police that you would have been happy to make about $6,000 to $7,000 from the venture. An estimate of the total street value of cannabis, that you could have obtained from growing these plants had all of them grown to their full potential and yielded a normal quantity, would have been in the vicinity of $150,000. However, when police located the plants, they were not fully grown and you did not actually get to the point of harvesting or selling any of the cannabis.
You are 69 years of age. You are married, with adult children and several grandchildren. You are currently serving a sentence of imprisonment imposed in September last year for a serious crime involving sexual offending, which was committed before you decided to commit the crimes with which I am dealing. Your criminal history contains some offences committed a long time ago for assault with indecent intent, but apart from offences of this nature, it consists exclusively of traffic offending. I note, however, that several of those are for drink-driving offences. You have no prior convictions at all for any drug related offending.
The commission of this crime was a very unwise and foolish attempt by you to make money by growing and selling drugs. Despite any popular views to the contrary, the law does not regard cannabis as a benign drug which is less harmful than other illegal drugs. Creating any illegal drug for the purpose of introducing it into the community is a serious matter. It is a crime which is particularly susceptible to general deterrence and that is the predominant sentencing consideration for such criminal conduct. Further, the commercial aspect of this crime aggravates your moral culpability for it. My strong suspicion is that you naïvely engaged in this activity in a relatively desperate attempt to ensure that your wife had some financial security because you knew that you were probably going to go to jail for the crime which you had committed a few months earlier. You and your wife were then and still are reliant on the age pension, and your imprisonment would have made her financial predicament extremely problematic. This does not excuse your conduct or reduce your moral culpability, but it does explain why a man of mature years would get involved in a business about which he has little knowledge, and which is obviously highly illegal, in the way that you did. Having regard to the objective seriousness of the crime, and in particular the need for general deterrence, the only appropriate punishment is a sentence of imprisonment. However, when I take into account your personal circumstances, as well as your plea of guilty, lack of prior convictions for similar offending and the principles of totality, my conclusion is that the sentencing objectives in this case can be adequately met by a wholly suspended sentence of imprisonment. In coming to this conclusion, I also take into account the mitigating aspects of your cooperation with police and early plea of guilty. In relation to your cooperation, I note that you volunteered to police the existence of one of the bush blocks and helped them to locate it. I do, however, intend to include in the sentence a period of suspension of sufficient length to ensure that you continue or that it continues to act as a deterrent to you from any temptation to reengage in conduct of this nature.
I impose sentence as follows. You are convicted of the crime to which you have pleaded guilty and sentenced to a term of 12 months’ imprisonment. The whole of that sentence will be suspended for a period of 3 years from today on the condition that you are not to commit another offence punishable by imprisonment during that period. I make the forfeiture orders sought by the prosecution. I also dismiss all remaining charges on complaint 51144/22. I note that the prosecution tendered no evidence in respect of same on the basis that the conduct was effectively subsumed in that relevant to the crime on the indictment.