In the courts
Published Friday October 30th, 2009
SAINT JOHN - Caught in sting, jailed for year
Another young man swept up in the six-month-long Operation Portland undercover drug sting will be doing time behind bars. Provincial court Judge Anne Jeffries sentenced Jeremy Ingersoll, 20, of King Street West to one year in jail Thursday after the accused entered a guilty plea to a charge of trafficking in cocaine on Sept. 3. She also ordered him to provide a DNA sample and prohibited him from owning or possessing firearms for a period of 10 years. Fourteen people had already received penitentiary-length terms for charges resulting from Operation Portland and one got 10 months. Defence counsel Rod Macdonald made a strong plea for a shorter sentence than most, saying Ingersoll had already quit dealing drugs before his arrest because he was "repulsed" at what they did. He was accused of selling $20 worth of cocaine to an undercover officer. After saying he was sorry for what he did, the judge asked, "Sorry enough not to do it again?" He assured her he was, adding, "You will never see me again."
Transferred power meter
SAINT JOHN - Jeremy Russell Bennett, 27, told provincial court Judge Alfred Brien he knows what he did was wrong, but he wasn't thinking that way when he took a power meter belonging to Saint John Energy off an empty building on St. James Street last July and installed it at 231 St. James St., where he lived. He said all he wanted at the time was for his family to be able to enjoy the luxuries of hot water, like baths, after having lived off a power generator and barbecue all summer because their electricity had been cut off. He said he only used the power source for two or three days before moving. The judge fined him $1,000 and ordered him to pay a victim fine surcharge. Bennett was given until Feb. 1 to pay his fines.
More The City
Search Articles
More CE Network Sites & Partners:
Comments (16)
All comments are subject to the site Terms of Use. For a full commenting tutorial click here.
Our editorial team relies on filtering technology and our visitor community to identify inappropriate comments. In the event that a site user has submitted offensive content that has evaded our filter, please select the option to Flag As Inappropriate presented within the comment. Thank you for helping to keep this site clean.
If you think of it as "standard of living" then what would be the difference between someone living in a developing country that does not have power or hot water and someone living in Canada that instead had the service disconnected?
As for what this person did, yes it's illegal but he/she was indeed doing what "he had to do". I question the whole victim surcharge thing in this case as well. Wouldn't he be the victim for not having the minimum quality of living in this country? Just my 2 cents.
If you subtract the persons action and speak on more of a broad sense I am sure you will agree that hydro isn't exactly a luxury. My point was that on a general sense there should be something put into place to prevent people from getting desperate like this in the first place.
Yet another quality post by D. Murray. Keep em coming you ignorant boob.
The problem with the "send them to jail" attitude is that people forget it's their tax dollars paying for the persons 3 square meals a day. Not to mention them being on Social Development afterwards because they are unemployable due to a criminal record. You might want to re-think the "send them to jail" line of thinking.
You're very good at making gross assumptions about people and situations... I happen to find it annoying and irresponsible.
This man committed a crime, he was justly punished for it. End of story. Why add made up garbage to it? Seriously... find something else to do.