Cannabis Courier Caught WINOL Week 6

14/11/12. By Christina Michaels, Court Correspondent:  

A courier has been sentenced for "doing a drug run" with £48,000 worth of cannabis in his boot.

Matthew Arthur, from Byron Avenue Margate, Kent, was stopped on his way to Gosport, where a suitcase with 12 kilos of cannabis was found in the car boot.

Winchester Crown Court heard that the drugs had a street value of around £120,000. Judge Patrick Hooton said that Arthur must have known what was in the suitcase.

The 39-year-old father pleaded guilty and was sentenced to one year in prison.

Week 6

This week marked the half way mark through the semester, and our roles. I have grown in confidence from the start, and I finally have started to feel like Court is 'my' beat, and despite the complications of court reporting I have built up experience and skills giving me the drive and determination to follow a story through. I find that this news beat is one that is a challenge, but one that I have a genuine interest in. Each week I am trying to take on the criticism I hear in the de-brief and put it in to practise to do new things and improve my package each week. This week the main desire was for a sequence, therefore I thought I would give this a go, and incorporate a sequence shots as a 'Reconstruction' of the case. I have wanted to do a reconstruction for a while, but the cases I have covered have been quite hard to re-enact  but this week's props were far more accessible  I did a sequence shot of the car, the wheels, opening the boot, seeing the suitcase, and opening the suitcase. This allowed me to experiment with different angles and realise the beauty of editing when you have plenty of GVs to play with, it certainly beats having just a PTC for the entire court report. So this week I was happy with the reconstruction making it more visually interesting, and with a mugshot also, identification was not a problem.

When I went down to court this week, I went in and sat in the Jamie Dack case, an ongoing trial that has been followed by a lot of press publications. This was a change from a sentencing, as it allowed me to hear the facts in more detail, and follow it through. However, there are dangers of contempt of court when the case is active therefore I tend to cover a sentencing to ensure the case is closed and no longer active.