Three men were convicted of four cannabis offences and sentenced at St Vincent’s Serious Offences Court on Tuesday 24 March 2020.[1] Curton Allen, 42, a diver of Clifton, Union Island, was jailed for one year and four months.[1]

Marvin Alexander, 43, a mechanic and the yacht’s captain, was jailed for two years and eight months.[1]

Mark Bristol, 52, a mason of McCarthy, was jailed for four years and seven months.[1] Time the three men had already spent in jail before the trial was deducted from their sentences.[1]

Lawyer Grant Connell had argued for a non-custodial or suspended sentence because Alexander and Allen had spent 13 months in prison and Bristol 11 months before making bail in December 2019.[1]

Chief Magistrate Rechanne Browne convicted the three of possessing 392,376 g of cannabis for drug trafficking, attempting to export it and conspiring to traffic it.[1]

The prosecution said the yacht Panasea was chased from Fancy on St Vincent’s North Windward coast into St Lucian waters on the night of 21 February 2019 before the men complied with an order to stop.[2] Coast guard officers fired warning shots and boarded the moving yacht from a dinghy before taking 13 nylon sacks of cannabis from its cabin.[2]

The prosecution put the street value of the cannabis at EC$1.73 million, a figure the defence rejected in earlier hearings.[3] The defence argued that the men were in St Lucian territorial waters when arrested, but Browne held that the pursuit began in St Vincent and the Grenadines and was covered by regional security treaties.[1]

Senior Prosecutor Adolphus Delplesche commended the three coast guard officers for their bravery in the operation, saying they had risked their lives in raging seas.[2] Delplesche told the court that while the conversation about cannabis was changing, the laws remained the same.[1]