When he sentenced Stephen Parsley to a year in prison this week for possessing cannabis for the purpose of trafficking, there was an issue provincial court Judge James Walsh refused to touch.
Parsley, 32, is licenced by Health Canada to grow cannabis for health reasons. Once he was convicted - after having been caught with 48 pounds of cannabis - the Crown asked Walsh to consider revoking Parsley's licence.
"That's an issue for Health Canada," the judge said.
Parsley was charged after police executed a search warrant in May 2014 on a St. John's home where they believed he was living, as well as on two backyard sheds. They found drugs in plastic bags and duffel bags in one shed, including cocaine and ecstasy on the seat of a side-by-side utility terrain vehicle. Parsley’s fingerprints were recovered from two vacuum-sealed bags of cannabis, with a total weight of 47.8 pounds.
Walsh acquitted Parsley of charges related to the other drugs, but said his guilt on the cannabis charge was "the only logical and reasonable conclusion based on the totality of the evidence."
“While the times they are a changing, they have not done so in any significant way with the criminal distribution of large quantities of cannabis,” Walsh said of Canada's newly relaxed cannabis laws.
It was Parsley’s second verdict on the same charges; he had been acquitted in 2017 by a different judge, who had ruled police did not have enough grounds to get a search warrant. That acquittal was overturned upon appeal by the Crown.
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