The purpose of the drug dealing was not proven by the Prosecutor's Office. For this reason, the judge acquitted two young men stopped by the Carabinieri in November with 4 kilos of marijuana in their car. The appeal of the public prosecutor was discounted.
The arrest
Tarik Karmouchi and Stanko Jankovic, 22 and 23 years old, both born in Sardinia although of foreign origin, were arrested on November 20th because they were stopped by the Carabinieri in a BMW 530 with 7 bags of marijuana on board, each containing 580 grams. The soldiers stopped them in the countryside and - according to investigators - after an escape attempt they were blocked. Having perceived a strong odor of cannabis in the passenger compartment, the Carabinieri found a cardboard box with 3,975 grams of marijuana in the seat of the car. At the home of one of the two, another 10.6 grams of hashish were recovered. They were defended by lawyers Emanuele Pizzoccheri and Alberto Marcis.
The defense
The two boys immediately defended themselves by clarifying that they had purchased light cannabis, also indicating who had regularly sold it to them with a receipt. Unfortunately, the Court's expert later clarified that they had an average dose of 15.9% of the active ingredient THC. All things considered, for the expert, those 4 kilos were equivalent to 22,387 single doses, while another 174 single doses could have been obtained from the hashish. During the trial held in Court, the dealer who allegedly sold it was called to testify. Answering the defense's questions, the dealer reiterated that it can happen that there is contamination of the seeds (regularly purchased in Germany) every now and then, therefore, that in the end, indica hemp came out instead of sativa hemp (light cannabis which must have an active ingredient of THC below 0.6%).
The contamination
The judge did not believe in any way the hypothesis of contamination. "If such an eventuality cannot be excluded occasionally and for sporadic cases", the sentence reads, "it seems almost impossible that the contamination involved all the seeds purchased for production, which then produced indica hemp plants instead of sativa". The Court therefore had no doubts about the fact that the seized substance was a narcotic, even after the outcome of the expert report.
