A 45-year-old pri­vate hire (PH) taxi dri­ver has been fined $50,000 af­ter ad­mit­ting to mar­i­jua­na traf­fick­ing.

Shur­land Bai­ley re­ceived the sen­tence on Tues­day af­ter plead­ing guilty to com­mit­ting drug traf­fick­ing be­fore Jus­tice Lisa Ram­sumair-Hinds.

Pre­sent­ing a mit­i­ga­tion plea on Bai­ley’s be­half, his lawyer Asha Watkins-Montserin not­ed that her client’s ac­tions were out of char­ac­ter as had nev­er been charged be­fore he was ar­rest­ed in 2009.

She claimed that the drugs did not be­long to Bai­ley and he was hired to trans­port the mar­i­jua­na.

She al­leged that he re­luc­tant­ly ac­cept­ed the il­le­gal job as he was fac­ing fi­nan­cial dif­fi­cul­ties at the time.

Watkins-Montserin al­so point­ed out that since be­ing charged and grant­ed bail, Bai­ley had not been charged with an­oth­er crime.

“He re­moved him­self from be­ing in­volved in any such sit­u­a­tion again. He is seek­ing to make him­self a use­ful and pro­duc­tive mem­ber of so­ci­ety,” she said.

She al­so not­ed that he had strong fam­i­ly links as she stat­ed that Bai­ley’s moth­er at­tend­ed all pre­vi­ous hear­ings of the case with him.

In is­su­ing the hefty fine, Jus­tice Ram­sumair-Hinds did not grant a pay­ment plan and or­dered that it be paid forth­with or he would face five years in prison.

Ac­cord­ing to the ev­i­dence in the case, on Feb­ru­ary 13, 2009, po­lice of­fi­cers re­ceived in­for­ma­tion that some­one was trans­port­ing il­le­gal firearms.

They spot­ted the ve­hi­cle dri­ving along the West­ern Main Road in St James and at­tempt­ed to stop the dri­ver, who sped off.

The ve­hi­cle was even­tu­al­ly in­ter­cept­ed a short dis­tance away.

While po­lice of­fi­cers did not find any­thing il­le­gal in the cab­in of the car, they found 100 pack­ages con­tain­ing ap­prox­i­mate­ly 96 ki­los of mar­i­jua­na hid­den in the trunk.

The case was pros­e­cut­ed by Char­maine Samuel and Gilliana Guy.