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A Simcoe woman who was days from giving birth was recently handed a five-year prison sentence in Ontario Court for her third drug conviction.
Maegan Sarah Jane McIntyre, 27, was arrested after a police investigation into the possibility she was dealing drugs from her Hendry Street apartment in the Norfolk County town of 15,000. During a 6 a.m. raid on Jan. 11, McIntyre was found with three baggies of 30.9 grams of fentanyl along with cash, cellphones and multiple digital scales nearby.
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“You’re going to have to decide,” Justice Elizabeth Wilson told McIntyre, “if you want to have a connection with the child you’re going to give birth to soon or whether you want to spend the rest of your adult life in custody while you continue to put the lives of the community at risk dealing fentanyl.”
While McIntyre has convictions for various other crimes on her record, she was convicted of possession of drugs for the purpose of trafficking in 2017 and 2019.
“This is now the third conviction for possessing a controlled substance for trafficking,” said federal prosecutor Jamie Pereira, who agreed to the five-year sentence.
“Obviously it’s a very significant sentence that reflects the seriousness of the charge. (Fentanyl) is a very dangerous substance and courts are regularly dealing with individuals selling this dangerous substance and often hearing of individuals dying of fentanyl overdoses.”
McIntyre hurried the justice process along with a quick guilty plea when she could have cost the community heavily by demanding her right to a preliminary hearing and a long trial, Pereira said.
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McIntyre’s defence lawyer, Robin McCourt, said her client had a disturbing history of abuse, hard drugs as a teen and at least 10 overdoses for which she was either injected with an anti-overdose medication or hospitalized.
“Now she’s pregnant with her first child and due to give birth in about two weeks,” McCourt said. “She very much wants to be a part of the baby’s life.
“She wants to turn her life around so that she can be the one to give her the best care and that’s one of the reasons she wanted to enter an early plea, to take advantage of the programs available to her (in prison).”
On her first drug conviction, McIntyre got 80 days in jail. On her second, in 2019, she got almost two years.
“I can’t minimize how very serious this offence is,” the judge said, “especially when we’re dealing with someone with two prior convictions for trafficking.
“Your background is unenviable and does help us understand how you may be involved in drug trafficking but it doesn’t excuse it.”
Wilson accepted the joint submission, giving McIntyre credit for 210 days of time served, leaving her four years and 155 days to serve in prison.
In an unrelated case that underscores the threat of fentanyl in Simcoe, a drug dealer went to prison after a woman died in her downtown Simcoe home when she ingested fentanyl that had been sold to her as cocaine in 2020. Highly addictive and up to 100 times more powerful than morphine, fentanyl was implicated in much of the opioid drug crisis that swept Ontario and the rest of the country in recent years.
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