A man is expected to serve a minimum two years jail time after trying to receive a cocaine delivery from Nigeria, which he claimed had been sent to his home at the behest of his friend "Pooh".
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Kyle Ian Christopher Wilson, 24, was sentenced in the ACT Supreme Court on December 16, having previously admitted attempting to possess a marketable quantity of a border-controlled drug.
He was sentenced to three years and seven months behind bars with a non-parole period of two years.
The Gordon man has been in custody on remand since November 2021, when Australian Border Force officers conducted X-rays on a package from Nigeria.
![The package that contained the imported cocaine. Picture ACT Policing The package that contained the imported cocaine. Picture ACT Policing](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/DaHt57RjVSvtvCBUgFzTWj/7753f90e-98eb-438e-9f2b-77aa8888f184.png/r0_139_1080_747_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
It had been declared as "weavon and eyelashes", but it in fact contained more than 700 grams of pure cocaine. The court previously heard the drugs were worth up to $500,000.
After the drugs had been substituted, a police officer posed as a courier and delivered the package.
Wilson, the occupant of the delivery address, accepted the parcel, which police later found in a raid of the house.
Following his arrest, Wilson told police a friend, saved in his phone as "Pooh Shiesty that's my dawg", had promised him cash for accepting the delivery.
Justice Geoffrey Kennett's decision, published on Wednesday, states he "placed greater weight on the offender's youth and prospects for rehabilitation" when determining jail time.
In the published decision, Justice Kennett said he took into account Wilson's "extremely difficult childhood" and history of drug use which had began at 13 years old and progressed to methamphetamine by the time he turned 15.
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Wilson's barrister, Rajiv Baldeo, told the court on December 15 that the 24-year-old had endured "a difficult life".
He described a childhood marred by domestic violence and bouts of homelessness, which had "unsurprisingly" resulted in "a significant problem with drugs" and a variety of mental health issues.
Mr Baldeo said it made "perfect sense" for someone affected by a combination of these factors to not have the same decision-making capacity as a person with a normal upbringing.
At the time, prosecutor Katrina Musgrove pushed for full-time imprisonment, arguing Wilson's "complex developmental trauma" might explain a violent crime committed "in the heat of the moment".
But Ms Musgrove said it had little relevance in a case where intercepted communications proved Wilson had known for at least two weeks before the delivery arrived that it was coming from overseas.
The prosecutor said Wilson had time to think, but he had still agreed to accept the parcel because he thought his reward would be "a quick fix" and "an easy way out, to solve his problems".
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