A British hairdresser jailed for importing cannabis resin has had her sentence extended following a Supreme Court appeal.

Lauren Davies, 24, had been jailed for six months but Chief Justice Ian Kawaley ruled that Senior Magistrate Archibald Warner had erred in sentencing by giving her a discount for which she was not eligible.

Davies was arrested on November 8 last year after arriving on a British Airways flight with 608.81 grams of cannabis resin hidden in a black Staples binder.

While she initially denied the offence, she pleaded guilty on January 8 to a single count of importing the drug.

Prosecutor Takiyah Burgess told Magistrates’ Court during sentencing that Davies was eligible to a discount of 35 percent for her cooperation and guilty plea, but defence lawyer Marc Daniels argued she was entitled to a 50 percent discount.

Delivering his sentence, Mr Warner found that a period of 12 months in prison was an appropriate base sentence and granted her a 50 percent discount for assisting police.

That sentence was subsequently appealed on the grounds that the basic sentence should have been higher and the size of the discount was wrong in principle.

In a ruling written on February 28, Mr Justice Kawaley wrote that while a base sentence of 12 months was at the “very bottom” of the appropriate sentencing range Mr Warner had not erred in principle by selecting it as the base sentence.

But he ruled that, based on the Misuse of Drugs Act 1972, Davies was not entitled to any statutory discount at all for cooperating with police stating that the act specifically required that she assist with both an investigation and a prosecution in order to receive such a discount.

“Since the prosecution conceded that the respondent was entitled to a very small additional discount at the sentencing hearing, it is not fairly open to seek to deprive the respondent of the benefit of that discount at this stage,” Mr Justice Kawaley said. “The appeal should be dealt with as if the relevant statutory provisions did apply.

“Even if the statutory provisions did apply, the Court below erred in principle in giving a more generous discount than that assessed by the prosecution as being appropriate, in circumstances where no material before the Court supported such approach.”

As a result of his ruling, the Chief Justice quashed the original sentence of six months imprisonment and substituted it with a sentence of eight months imprisonment.

However, he added that the ruling did not prevent her from getting a greater discount should she be able to demonstrate that she assisted in the prosecution of another offender.