A Canberra cocaine courier has been carted off to jail for at least 15 months after a back seat bust in which police found drugs potentially worth a six-figure sum.
David Achanfuo Yeboah, 43, was locked up after a judge expressed scepticism about claims he had felt compelled to transport drugs by criminals who had threatened him.
Sentencing remarks, published on Wednesday, show Yeboah faced the ACT Supreme Court to learn his fate earlier this month, having previously pleaded guilty to three charges.
These were drug trafficking, dealing with the proceeds of crime and possessing a prohibited weapon.
Justice Geoffrey Kennett said Yeboah had committed the offences in August 2020, when police stopped him as he returned to Canberra from a Sydney trip in a Holden Cascada.
When officers asked if he "had anything on him", Yeboah handed over a spring-loaded flick knife.
A subsequent search of the car uncovered more than 270 grams of cocaine, worth anywhere between $42,460 and $104,027, in a bag on the back seat.
Yeboah was then interviewed by police, telling them a friend had given him $1500 in cash that was "probably dirty". He said he had given this money to his partner.
When Yeboah pleaded guilty, he did so on the basis he was trafficking the cocaine by transporting the drug with the belief someone else intended to sell it.
"He was, effectively, a courier not otherwise involved in the operation," Justice Kennett said.
The judge referred during sentencing to two reports, both of which described Yeboah claiming he had been motivated to offend by a drug debt incurred in 2013.
Yeboah claimed "antisocial criminal peers", to whom he owed the purported debt, had instructed him to transport cocaine from Sydney to Canberra in order to partially pay it off.
"The offender also said that these persons made threats to him and his family, which made the offender feel compelled to accede to their request," Justice Kennett said.
The judge went on to say the authors of both reports had expressed reservations about Yeboah's claims because of a letter the 43-year-old had given ACT Corrective Services.
Justice Kennett called this document, which said Yeboah suffered from an incurable eye condition, "bogus", labelling almost every sentence in it "ungrammatical".
"This makes it all the more difficult for me to rely on the truthfulness of statements that [Yeboah] made to the authors of the reports," the judge said.
Justice Kennett therefore refused to accept Yeboah's claims about his motivation as fact, instead proceeding on the basis it was unclear whether he was "performing a courier service in part payment of a drug-related debt".
The judge ultimately sentenced Yeboah, an aspiring real estate agent who already had a drug trafficking conviction on his criminal record, to two years and five months in jail.
With the term backdated to start in May, Yeboah will become eligible for early release on parole in August 2023.
