The family of a young man sent to jail for supplying the drug Ecstasy to a 15 year-old companion wailed at the back of the court as the sentence was handed down.
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Glen Innes court heard that Daniel Bradley Bodsworth who was 19 at the time gave the drug plus alcohol to someone he knew while they were in a house in the town.
On the morning of July 18 last year, the companion started having convulsions and went into uncontrollable fits.
The court heard that the victim was hallucinating.
The paramedics and an ambulance arrived and were unable to halt the spasms so the victim was taken to Glen Innes Hospital and was treated and recovered.
But the police talked to the person who had called the ambulance and he admitted supplying the drug.
He pleaded guilty in court to supplying a “prohibited drug – small quantity”.
Magistrate Michael Holmes took a particularly dim view of the crime because it involved supplying a drug to a person who was only 15 years of age.
This is a “serious matter”, said Mr Holmes.
“It is particularly serious because it was to a young person and it had dreadful results”.
Bodsworth was sentenced to 18 months in prison, with no possibility of parole until he has served six months.
He was also punished severely for a series of offences to do with cars, in particular speeding and driving unregistered and uninsured vehicles with poor tires. On seven different offences, he received a total of $2,000 in fines.
It emerged in court that he had never had a driving licence.
When Bodsworth was sentenced to prison and led away immediately by two police officers, women at the back of the court started crying.
Before sentencing, he and they had appeared calm outside the court and not as though his freedom was about to be curtailed.
There was no suggestion in court that Bodsworth was a professional drug dealer, but rather that he had given both ecstasy and cannabis as well as alcohol to a person whom he knew and who was only in the mid teens.