Heck, even if you're a couple of sixty-somethings who grow marijuana and donate large amounts of the profits to charity, you're still going to jail in the UK:
If something should be legal it should be legal regardless of what happens with the proceeds, similarly if it should be illegal then what happens with the proceeds should be irrelevant.
I don't think that what they did should be illegal (though I do think it should be regulated), but what happened with the money should be neither here nor there as far as the law is concerned. You don't get to buy favour.
It doesn't change whether you committed an offence or not, but it should, and does, impact the punishment you receive for it.
In this case I would argue the sentencing guidelines are too restrictive; although they were given punishments at the lower bound (three years in prison), this was still completely disproportionate to the crime they committed.
The crime they committed was not a violent one, and did not significantly harm anyone. It diverted money away from criminal gangs towards charitable projects. The couple involved were of good character, and did not pose a danger to society by any stretch of the imagination.
I think it's plain to see locking them up for three years is a colossal waste of taxpayers' money.
I have no issue with the judge taking into account that they were probably genuinely nice people and I suspect that that was indeed taken into account (if you read the Guardian account, even the prosecutor mentions it).
However, while not breaking down the numbers, it doesn't sound like most of the money went on philanthropic endeavours and I suspect it was a long way short of even a majority of the money (I've read four newspaper accounts now and not one uses "most" to describe the proportion).
In reality of a three year sentence given their prior record, their age and the nature of the crime, they'll likely serve a little over one year and that'll be in a relatively low security prison. As they've likely personally profited to the tune of over £250,000 after their charitable donations that doesn't seem entirely unreasonable.
Also worth noting this line form the Telegraph account:
"Mr Foster, 62, admitted regularly selling cannabis in deals of around £1,500 to a local drug dealer to whom he had been introduced through a loan shark."
The point here is that while they're nice, some of the people who they seem engaged with in the wider venture might not be. They're not in this on their own, they're also enabling others. If you deal drugs you probably have other people sell them, you probably get involved in money laundering and all that can lead to a greater criminal enterprise which will have genuine negative effects, even if what you personally do doesn't.
Now you can make a really great case that it's only the illegality that makes that so, and I'm completely on side with that and support it, but while it remains illegal it does mean that it's hard to do the sort of things they do in an entirely innocent way.
> As they've likely personally profited to the tune of over £250,000 after their charitable donations that doesn't seem entirely unreasonable.
I assume they will have had their assets seized as proceeds of crime, so it's not as though they are trading off jail time for profit.
> The point here is that while they're nice, some of the people who they seem engaged with in the wider venture might not be. They're not in this on their own, they're also enabling others.
I wouldn't view it as enabling. If this couple aren't supplying the dealers, someone else will be, and that other person is almost guaranteed to be a nastier individual.
As I say, in a sense this couple were diverting funds away from real, nasty criminal enterprises towards their apparently harmless selves, and the charitable projects they supported.
If you're claiming charitable donations out of what they made means they should get leniency then trading profit for jail time is exactly what's happening.
Donations made from what they make = less profit directly to them. If that then leads to a shorter sentence (or as you're saying no sentence) then how is that not trading off jail time for profit?
The only thing you can say in their favour is that it seems unlikely that they were thinking that cynically when they did it, that the donations were probably genuine rather than an attempt to play the system, but it still sets a very dangerous precedent.
Besides, what about all the money they've already spent which can't be recovered? There really is no argument that they didn't profited from the crime.
http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/10/19/british-couple-jailed-fo...