A woman found guilty of smuggling marijuana into a Maple Ridge men’s prison will not spend anytime in custody.
Brigitte Ingrid Schepannek received a nine-month conditional sentence for the crime.
The sentence includes a curfew from 9:30 p.m. to 7 a.m. for the first five months and 50 hours of community service.
A judgement released earlier this month details how Schepannek was caught delivering a package of pot, hash and tobacco to her common-law partner Jimmy Benoit, who was an inmate at the Fraser Regional Correctional Centre in March 2009.
Schepannek was seen by another visitor passing a package over a glass barrier to Benoit inside the 256th Street prison.
Corrections officers reviewed video surveillance after the complaint and Schepannek was escorted out of the visitors’ area for questioning.
Schepannek told the officers she had passed tobacco to Benoit.
The court heard the 40-year-old woman was a mother of four children, aged two to 12 years, and is the sole provider for the family.
She has had a relationship with Benoit, the father of her two youngest children, since 2003.
She told the court Benoit called her and said he was in trouble and needed help because some other inmates were after him.
He asked her if she could “please, please, please do a favour for him.”
Benoit wanted Schepannek to bring tobacco into the prison for him on a future visit. She said she did not want to, as she knew it was illegal.
Benoit told her she would receive a telephone call later about the tobacco and that she was to meet a guy.
Two days later, Schepannek received a call from a man who told her to meet him in a parking lot of a Burnaby school.
There she was handed a sock that contained a cylinder-shaped object about eight centimetres long and the thickness of a small cigar.
The next day, she smuggled the package inside the prison in her underwear.
Besides the nine-month conditional sentence, Schepannek also received a 10-year firearms ban.