By Staff Reporter

Last updated at 12:01, Monday, 10 June 2013

A university graduate who arranged for 100 Ecstasy tablets to be sent through the post has been jailed for three years.

John Watt, a 25-year-old with a politics degree, had the package delivered to a friend’s house because he was worried that members of his family might open it if it arrived at his own home.

The friend – 36-year-old Paul David Miller – was arrested by police after the parcel containing the banned class A tablets was intercepted by customs officers.

And, Carlisle Crown Court heard, the trail quickly led to Watt, who had paid £300 for the drugs to be sent from Holland.

He admitted he would have sold some of them to his friends, but said most of the tablets were for his own “quite heavy” use.

Watt, who used to be known as Jonathan Air until he changed his name last year, was jailed for 32 months after he pleaded guilty to evading customs regulations intended to prevent the importation of banned drugs.

He was also ordered to serve four months of a suspended 12-month sentence. This had been imposed in April last year after Watt pleaded guilty to grievous bodily harm.

On that occasion he fractured the eye socket of a young woman when he hit her after she rebuffed his attentions in a pub.

Judge Paul Batty QC told him he was lucky the part-time judge who sentenced him for that offence had not sent him straight to prison in the first place.

The judge described that offence – which left student Sophie Horne needing an emergency operation to insert a metal plate into her face – as “extremely nasty”.

“It was an extremely merciful sentence,” he said. “You were extremely fortunate to get it.

“If you had appeared before me the sentence would not have been suspended.”

Defence barrister Philip Andrews described Watt, who lives in Bowman Street, Botchergate, Carlisle, as “a young man who is no fool by any means”.

But he said for a long time he had had problems with drink and he started taking Ecstasy after the break-up of a relationship.

As a result, Mr Andrews said, Watt has “deficits in his consequential thinking skills”.

At the same hearing Miller, of Westville, Harraby, Carlisle, pleaded guilty to being concerned in the supply of the drugs by allowing Watt to use his home as an accommodation address.

He was given an 18-month prison sentence, suspended for two years, and ordered to do 200 hours unpaid community work.

First published at 12:00, Monday, 10 June 2013
Published by http://www.newsandstar.co.uk