A MAN with 41 previous convictions has been sentenced to four years and 21 weeks in prison after his fingerprints were found on a sports bag containing £230,000 worth of cannabis which had been dumped near a school.
Ian Stuart Richomme maintained that he had found the bag on the street and picked it up to use it to carry his possessions, but he was found guilty of possessing cannabis with intent to supply following a trial this summer.
Crown Advocate Lauren Hallam, prosecuting, told the Royal Court that the bag was handed in to Plat Douet school in February after being found just outside the premises. A member of staff checked inside it and called police when she saw its contents, which included a plastic bag of clothes, a massage gun, cans of beer, and almost 7kg of cannabis in various forms, with an estimated street value of £230,000.
Fingerprints were later found inside the sports bag and on the massage gun which matched those of Richomme, Advocate Hallam told the court. She added that the large quantity of drugs found in February ‘could only have been a commercial amount of drugs’ which showed his ‘trusted role within the drug trafficking community’.
Richomme was also sentenced yesterday for two additional offences, which were committed in the summer while he was on bail for the drugs offence.
The first happened on the evening of 10 July, when he was denied entry to a club in town as he was barred, and became aggressive and shouted threats. Richomme was charged with one count of threatening or abusive behaviour for this offence, which he pleaded guilty to.
The second took place on 15 August, when Richomme received a call from his partner to say her patio doors had been damaged, with the defendant later calling the person he believed to be responsible and shouting abuse down the phone.
Advocate Hallam described the phone call – which also included bomb threats and threats of sexual assault – as ‘abusive and explicitly threatening’.
Calling for a total sentence of four years and 23 weeks imprisonment for the three offences, Advocate Hallam said that Richomme’s behaviour was ‘unpleasant and highly abusive’, and added that he had 41 previous convictions, putting him at ‘very high risk of reconviction’.
Advocate Stephen Wauchope, defending, argued the court had no evidence to prove what Richomme’s role in the drug supply chain was. The court was told there was ‘no evidence of any retail sale or attempt to sell any drugs’ and ‘no evidence of drugs being packaged for sale’, which he said suggested his client was a ‘mere custodian’ and not a ‘trusted member of the drug trafficking community’.
Advocate Wauchope added Richomme’s ‘formative years were so crowded with misery, bereavement, abuse and neglect, that he must be considered an exceptional case even in this court’.
Richomme received an additional four-week prison sentence for threatening behaviour and eight weeks imprisonment for using threatening words.
It was decided these two additional sentences should be served concurrently with each other but consecutively to the drugs sentence, bringing Richomme’s overall time in jail to a total of four years and 13 weeks.
Sentencing Richomme, Deputy Bailiff Robert McRae described the three offences as ‘very serious’.
