Tanzania upholds thirty years for growing cannabis but drops a possession count

Tanzania’s Court of Appeal upheld Hamis Muhibu Abdallah’s thirty-year sentence for cultivating cannabis in March 2022.^[1] Although it quashed a separate possession conviction, the cultivation sentence remained because the court found other evidence supported his retracted confession.^[1]

Police found a field of 535 plants

Police acting on information went to a farm in Nanyumbu District in May 2017.^[1] Officers and an independent witness found 535 cannabis plants, which were uprooted and taken as exhibits.^[1]

Hamis and his younger brother were charged, but the brother was acquitted at trial.^[1] Hamis received concurrent thirty-year sentences for cultivation and possession, and his earlier appeal was unsuccessful.^[1]

The 2015 drug law provided at least thirty years for unlawful cultivation of prohibited plants.^[2] The appeal therefore concerned evidence carrying a sentence measured in decades.^[1][2]

The confession was disputed but supported by other evidence

Hamis challenged the evidence linking him to the farm and withdrew the admission attributed to him.^[1] The appeal court considered whether that admission had independent support.^[1]

It relied on evidence that he had led police to the field and on testimony from an independent witness who knew the land and had seen him developing it into a farm.^[1] Witness evidence also placed him at the scene growing cannabis.^[1]

The court found that those details supported the confession and left no reasonable doubt about the cultivation offence.^[1] It rejected his defence that the farm was not his.^[1]

The same plants did not prove a second offence

The judges distinguished evidence of cultivation from evidence of the separate possession count.^[1] Plants uprooted from the farm proved the growing allegation, but did not establish the additional possession charge as presented.^[1]

They therefore quashed the possession conviction and its corresponding thirty-year sentence.^[1] The ruling kept the two offences separate instead of allowing the same allegation about the growing plants to establish both.^[1]

One surviving count still meant thirty years

The two sentences had run concurrently, so removing the possession sentence left the cultivation term in place.^[1] The appeal was otherwise dismissed, and Hamis remained subject to thirty years in prison.^[1]

For growers in Tanzania, the case showed the practical force of the cultivation minimum.^[1][2] Correcting one charge changed the convictions on the record, while the proven growing offence continued to determine the time in custody.^[1]