A convicted fentanyl dealer from British Columbia’s Lower Mainland has lost his application for a lighter sentence that lessened his risk of deportation.
This fall, an appeals court heard Sean Delano Stampp’s plea and acknowledged that deportation would affect his fiancée and three children in the province — but ultimately decided to uphold his A sentence of one year’s imprisonment.
“Collateral immigration consequences are only one of the relevant factors that must be considered in determining an appropriate sentence,” Judge Lauri Ann Fenlon wrote in an essay. The decision, published online last week.
The court heard Stamp was a permanent resident who immigrated with his family from Jamaica as a child.
Under federal law, permanent residents convicted of drug trafficking offenses are deemed inadmissible to Canada — and those sentenced to six months or more in prison lose the right to appeal their deportation orders.
Fenlon said it was a “mistake in principle” for the judge not to consider immigration consequences in sentencing, but found that the seriousness of Stampp’s offense overruled those considerations.
She noted that he was involved in a drug trafficking operation that dealt exclusively with the sale of fentanyl, a drug that “kills hundreds of people every month in British Columbia.”
“In my opinion, the 6-month daily sentence reduction for fentanyl trafficking in the circumstances of this case is disproportionate to the seriousness of the crime and the degree of responsibility of the offender,” she wrote.
“He was not a drug addict, but sold fentanyl purely for financial gain.”
While Stampp has no previous criminal record, the court heard he was on probation as part of a conditional release after he was caught trading before 2018.
He was arrested again in April 2019 when Coquitlam RCMP began tracking down the cell phone number used in the local dial-up operation. An undercover officer then arranged a meeting with Stamp, then 21, and bought an eighth of the fentanyl from him for $480.
Prosecutors had initially asked for a 22-month sentence, but the judge opted for a lighter sentence — far less than the usual 18-month to three-year terms.
In doing so, the trial judge considered a number of mitigating factors, including that Stamp “put his life on a more positive trajectory by disassociation from his criminal associates, access to regular employment and the support of his young family, which he It’s the only financial support available right now.”
Stamp’s oldest child lived with his ex-partner, while his two younger children lived with him and his fiancée, the court heard.
The judge also considered Stampp’s mental health challenges, which included a previous diagnosis of major depressive disorder and substance-induced psychosis in 2017 — though Stampp’s lawyer’s argument that he had relapsed into psychosis at the time of his latest arrest was rejected by both courts. turn down.
Drug dealers “cease using psychosis-inducing drugs by the end of 2017,” Fenlon wrote.