KEY POINTS:
A young couple lost almost $70,000 saved from a cannabis growing operation but are being allowed to keep their home in the Christchurch suburb of Belfast.
The two young children - a girl aged three, and a boy aged 17 months who live there with their parents - were important considerations in today's decision by Justice John Fogarty not to seize the Main North Road house.
Prosecutor Kerryn Beaton said the Crown conservatively assessed the value of the cannabis offending as $76,000.
When the police raided the house they found cash totalling $68,890, most of it in a safe. A bedroom had been used for the growing operation.
Simon John Inwood, 29, a meat worker, was today sentenced to 10 months' home detention for cultivating cannabis, possession of cannabis for sale, and selling the class C drug. He had pleaded guilty.
His partner, 28-year-old Raewyn Elizabeth Tomlins, had earlier been given four months' home detention on a charge of allowing the home to be used for the cannabis operation, and selling some of it herself.
She was in court next to her partner today to hear Justice Fogarty accept the submissions from defence counsel David Ruth that forfeiture of the house where the offending occurred would cause undue hardship or be disproportionately severe.
"If this family is put out on the street in current conditions, there is no way in the world that this couple is going to be able to fund itself into another family home for the children, and it will be forced to rent," Mr Ruth said.
Justice Fogarty dismissed the application from the Solicitor-General to take the house but ordered that the cash - almost the whole proceeds of the offending, saved by the couple - to be handed over to the Crown.
Also before the court was Inwood's mother, Sharon Mary Lillian Inwood, 48, who lived nearby and also admitted possession and sale of cannabis, as well as a receiving charge.
She was put on home detention for six months and $710 cash found at her house along with some cannabis tinnies was ordered forfeited to the Crown.
Justice Fogarty decided immediately that he was not going to order forfeiture of the house. Sharon Inwood has an 11-year-old daughter living at her home.
- NZPA
