EDMONTON: An Edmonton grandmother who tried to smuggle drugs inside her body cavity into the Edmonton Institution has been found not guilty.
Linda Ethal Sheridan, 62, admitted she brought the drugs to the maximum-security prison for her incarcerated son, but argued the offences were committed under duress because she was told her son would be killed if she didn’t transport the contraband.
“It was a pressure situation, and, you know, I folded to the pressure and I shouldn’t have, obviously,” Sheridan told a police officer after she was caught.
The Crown argued Sheridan could not use duress as an excuse for her criminal behaviour because it “did not have an air of reality.”
But in an 18-page written decision, Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Mary Moreau determined Sheridan’s story did meet the requirements of being under duress at the time, and the Crown failed to disprove it beyond a reasonable doubt.
Moreau said she found Sheridan to be a “credible witness whose account of the events and her decision to smuggle drugs into the Institution was not shaken after a thorough cross-examination.”
Sheridan and her 10-year-old granddaughter were going to visit her son at the maximum-security prison on July 22, 2013, when a drug-sniffing dog singled her out.
Sheridan was escorted to a women’s bathroom where she removed three packages containing methamphetamine, heroin and marijuana resin from her vagina.
Officials later found nicotine patches, cigarettes and hydromorphone, an opiate, in her bra. The drugs would have been worth $12,230 inside the prison, Crown prosecutor Monique Dion told the court. Drugs often have an inflated value inside the prison system.
Sheridan was charged with four counts of possession of a controlled substance for the purpose of trafficking.
Sheridan testified that she had received an anonymous phone call two weeks before the scheduled visit to the prison. The caller asked if she loved her son, then threatened his life. Sheridan was told her son would be killed if she didn’t smuggle in the drugs. The caller told her to smuggle them inside her body and in her underwear.
“He said if I did exactly as he told me, the drugs wouldn’t be detected,” she previously told the court.
The drugs arrived in a mailed brown envelope a few days later, Sheridan said, already wrapped in cellophane and condoms. She hid the package and didn’t tell her husband. Two days later, the anonymous caller phoned again and repeated his death threat. She didn’t report the calls because the caller knew where she lived and had background information on her son. She believed the threat was real, she said.
Sheridan’s son was involved with a dangerous gang and had been shot twice in Calgary and stabbed seven times in prison. Sheridan said she felt her son would be murdered if she did not comply.
After the judge delivered her verdict, Sheridan’s husband bowed his head in his hands. Sheridan got teary-eyed and thanked and hugged her lawyer.
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