A 50-year-old man will spend six years in prison after pleading guilty to drug charges.
The man entered his plea to charges of transporting more than 5 pounds of marijuana into Virginia to distribute. He also pleaded guilty to one count of possessing drugs with the intent of distributing between a half pound and 5 pounds.
The judge sentenced the man to 16 years in all and suspended 10 of them. He also was ordered to pay $2,000 in restitution to repay for the police operation to arrest him.
The man told law-enforcement authorities that he had been driving to another mid-Atlantic state to buy marijuana to bring it back to Virginia to sell, according to police reports.
The case began in February when county authorities received a tip that the man would be bringing a large quantity of marijuana back to his home in Evington, Virginia. Following the tip, sheriff’s deputies watched his apartment building. The next morning, when the man returned home in a Ford Mustang, investigators confiscated nearly 5 pounds of marijuana.
In searching the building, deputies found another 9 pounds and believe they walked away with 20 pounds in all, even though the remainder was not tested to determine for certain that it was pot.
According to the commonwealth’s attorney, law enforcement shot down one of the county’s most significant drug operations with the man’s arrest.
The man told the judge in the Campbell County Circuit Court that he was a student at Liberty University who was just nine credit hours short of earning a degree in criminal justice. As an advanced student in that department, he should have been aware of the potential ramifications of such a crime and determined a plea deal was in his best interest.
Source: The News & Advance, “Evington man pleads guilty to drug charges,” Dave Thompson, Aug. 9, 2012
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