Inmate jailed for two extra months for smuggling scheduled substance into prison

A 40-year-old prison inmate who was jailed for 12 years in 2006 for drug trafficking offences has been jailed for an additional two months, after a magistrate heard how he had smuggled a heroin substitute into the Corradino Correctional Facility upon his admission to the prison.

Jason Zammit, who had been imprisoned after being found guilty of having supplied cocaine between February 1997 and May 1998, as well as having trafficked heroin between July 1998 and January 2000, near a Hamrun school and near the Pieta football club, had released a statement shortly after his imprisonment.

In this statement, Zammit confirmed that before being sentenced, he had inserted 68 DHC pills – a scheduled medicinal usually used in the treatment of heroin addiction – into his rectum. He had claimed to have done so as the pills had been prescribed to him as treatment for his addiction and were not available to inmates at CCF.

Zammit said that he would consume between ten and twelve of these pills every day and would carry a jar of 56 pills around with him as he would occasionally spend over 48 hours away from home.

He added that the pills had been on his person for some time and that he had forgotten about them before he was taken to court, remembering only when he “saw policemen looking at him”. He claimed that he was not expecting to be taken to CCF that day as his previous sittings had been postponed, but when he was outside the courtroom he decided to play it safe and went to the toilet to hide the drugs in the only place he could think of.

However, the court was not convinced that Zammit was in the habit of carrying so many pills around with him, nor was it convinced that he had forgotten them on his person and decided to hide them when he saw the policemen looking at him. 

Magistrate Natasha Galea Sciberras in fact noted that this was not the first time that the accused had been to prison and this led her to believe that he had hidden the pills for the sole reason that he knew he was going to be incarcerated and feared that he would not be granted access to the pills otherwise.

In deciding on the punishment to be meted out to the accused, the court took into account his many previous convictions, which included convictions for involuntary homicide, several counts of heroin possession and multiple convictions for aggravated theft.

The Magistrate ruled that a further two months of incarceration were to be added to Zammit’s sentence and ordered the drugs be destroyed, under the supervision of the court registrar.

Lawyers Lucio and Michael Sciriha defended Zammit.