This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Legal
Doherty takes drugs to court, gets fine
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 28 January 2010
Pete Doherty got away with a fine after he appeared in court yesterday to face charges of bringing nine (or thirteen, depending on who you believe) wraps of heroin into a previous hearing.
Doherty was at Gloucester Crown Court on 21 Dec in relation to those previously reported drink driving charges, for which he was arrested last June. At the hearing he was given a fine of £2050. On his way out of the court, he dropped a bag containing four grams of heroin on the floor. This meant another arrest and another trip to Gloucester for the musician.
Yesterday, Doherty’s lawyer Bruce Clark informed District Judge Joti Boparai that it had all been a big accident, and that the drugs had only been in Pete’s pocket because he owns a lot of coats and has bought enough heroin in his time to be able to forget that he had a big bag of it in one of his pockets.
Clark said: “My client was in a rush to get to court. He was handed a coat in the morning and he didn’t check the pockets. He has a great many items of clothing – suits and clothes going into the hundreds. There were residual drugs which he had left in one coat pocket. He had been in and out of court twice before the package fell out of his pocket. He feels very stupid, but he accepts responsibility.He is currently receiving treatment to get him off the drugs and he wasn’t aware he would find drugs in his suit pocket. [The treatment is] working for him. This was an accident. This was the ghost of past offending, not the resurrection. This was no mickey take, it was a mistake”.
Boparai seemed to agree, though said that if Doherty wasn’t “doing it [the in-court drug dropping] for the publicity”, he was certainly stupid. Sentencing him to a £750 fine, Boparai said: “I am sure by your reputation this was simply stupidity on your part and it wasn’t any more than that. It was simply an error”.
