Another woman at court to support her was equally shocked and was restrained momentarily by a security officer as she yelled people had not done enough to help her friend.
"She should've been in the drug and alcohol court.
"She should've had a historical [cultural] report done for her sentencing," the woman yelled.
Nicol's counsel Dave Sayes later told NZME that Nicol immediately instructed him to appeal the sentence.
Police got a production order in July 2020 to examine Nicol's phone discovering text messages that provided the necessary evidence for six charges of offering to supply. The possession charge related to two grams of meth police found in a container beside Nicol's bed and a smaller amount in a point bag near it.
Counsel Dave Sayes submitted the offending fell into band one of a tariff case and urged the court to impose an end sentence of home detention. Nicol was akin to a low-level street dealer, Sayes said.
But Judge McDonald disagreed. Meth was an "evil" drug and Nicol had contributed to the widespread damage caused by it in Tai Tokerau.
This was not a woman peddling point bags to feed her addiction but someone offering gram amounts, enabling others in a supply chain to "cut" the drug further and on-sell it to even more people, the judge said.
He put the offending in band two of the tariff case and set a starting point of two years and 10 months, with four months' uplift for previous relevant offending.
Nicol had done this before, the judge said. In 2018, she received six months of home detention for supply charges involving 2.5g of meth.
Sayes submitted there should be a discount for Nicol's addiction issues. But the judge refused to give any, saying her claims of addiction were only self-reported and were not backed by any independent evidence.
Nicol's mother wrote a letter to the court on the subject, but was only able to report what she had heard through the grapevine and had not witnessed her daughter's drug use firsthand.
There was no evidence of Nicol having approached a residential treatment provider or having completed any drug rehabilitation programmes ahead of sentence.
Her previous home detention sentence was designed to help her deal with her addiction but despite being given all that help, her offending increased, the judge said.
He refused to give a full 25 per cent discount for Nicol's guilty pleas, limiting it to 10 per cent. Nicol knew what she had done – the incriminating texts were on her phone – but it was nine months and seven court appearances before she pleaded, the judge said.
He gave a further 10 per cent discount for the 10 months Nicol spent on electronically-monitored bail.
