Fiji’s appeal court sentences growers by plant count and their role

Fiji’s Court of Appeal set separate sentencing guidelines for cannabis growers on 25 May 2023, combining the number of plants with each person’s role. The ranges stretched from non-custodial or suspended sentences for the least serious personal cultivation to sixteen to twenty years for leaders of large operations. Jone Seru, whose appeal prompted the ruling, kept his nine-year prison sentence.

Judges had been using conflicting approaches

The earlier 2012 guidelines divided cannabis offences by weight. Applying them to growing produced disagreement because freshly uprooted plants weighed more than dried material.

Some judges instead used plant counts and the purpose of cultivation. The Legal Aid Commission submitted 33 High Court cases showing the uneven results. In one comparison highlighted by the court, a grower with 196 plants received seven years and seven months, while another with 46 plants received eleven years and four and a half months.

Both prosecutors and Legal Aid sought a more consistent approach.

Plant numbers and responsibility worked together

The court divided cultivation into four plant bands: fewer than ten for personal use, ten to fifty, more than fifty but fewer than 100, and 100 or more. It then distinguished leading, significant and lesser roles.

Someone directing an operation or organising land, workers and equipment could have a leading role. A person carrying out limited gardening tasks under instructions, or growing solely for personal use, could have a lesser role.

For lesser-role cultivation in the smallest band, the range ran from a sentence outside prison to a suspended sentence. For a leading role in the largest band, the starting point was eighteen years, within a sixteen-to-twenty-year range.

Seru’s twenty plants still meant years in prison

Police had found twenty plants weighing 5.5 kg at Seru’s Savusavu farm. He had bought seedlings, planted them and tended the crop while also growing food and other crops and doing landscaping work.

The court treated him as leading a small commercial operation. It concluded that the new approach would be unlikely to give him less than nine years and left his existing sentence in place.

Older cases could benefit from the new approach

The guidelines required judges to consider aggravating and mitigating circumstances and make further adjustments, including for guilty pleas and time already spent in custody.

In May 2024, the appeal court used the new approach to reduce two growers’ sentences by four years each. Their case showed how the effort to make cultivation sentencing more consistent could change the years people spent in Fiji’s prisons.^[1][2][3]