Cannabis seller dealt at school

An Invercargill woman was caught with text messages on her phone relating to a cannabis deal at a primary school.

Liane Mary Toparea, 41, unemployed, appeared before Judge Kevin Phillips in the Invercargill District Court yesterday for sentence on 15 charges of offering to sell cannabis and 35 of possessing cannabis for supply.

Judge Phillips sentenced Toparea to seven months' home detention.

The charges resulted from two 10-day periods between November 19 and December 10 last year in which text messages sent and received on Toparea's phone were intercepted by police.

The wide-ranging police sting, code-named Operation Santa, concluded with a search warrant executed at Toparea's Oreti St house, where quantities of the class C drug were seized.

Toparea pleaded guilty to the charges part way through her jury trial in August.

In his sentencing yesterday, Judge Phillips described the nature of the texts found on Toparea's phone.

Most alluded to drugs deals at Invercargill taverns but one pointed to cannabis being offered for sale at a primary school, he said.

"The texts seized from your phone showed you were dealing drugs for quite some some ... transactions were going down on a regular basis."When the search warrant was executed on Toparea's home, police caught her trying to dispose of 15 cannabis foils by flushing them down the toilet, Judge Phillips said.

"You have tried to deny all this ... you had no chance of defending this but you continued to plead your innocence in this court, at times, in front of me."

Judge Phillips said Toparea had a history of drug dealing, which had resulted in four previous convictions between 1986 and 1992. "One only has to sit in this court on a weekly basis to see the lives that have been ruined by cannabis, and you are a purveyor of that."

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