A woman later convicted for drug dealing was caught with a stun gun – disguised as a torch.
Holly Gittings, 23, had been arrested outside a house in Gregory Place, Witney, on January 8, 2020, as police believed she was dealing drugs.
Just days earlier, she was caught in Kent selling class As.
When the police arrested her in Witney she asked them to collect her handbag from the house.
Inside, was a Taser-type stun gun device disguised as a torch.
Gittings, who appeared before Oxford Crown Court from HMP Peterborough wearing a Givenchy-branded top, claimed not to know that the device was capable of discharging an electrical charge.
Prosecutor Matthew Walsh acknowledged to Judge Ian Pringle QC that only the torch element of the device was charged-up. A specialist firearms officer had to charge up the implement in order to test its power as a weapon.
Asking the police to retrieve her handbag with the ‘torch’ inside ‘wouldn’t be the smartest course’ if Gittings was aware that the flashlight was also an illegal weapon, Mr Walsh accepted.
Judge Pringle acknowledged the prosecutor’s scepticism but said of the difference between the Crown and the defendant’s positions: “I don’t think it’s going to make any difference to the sentence I’m going to pass.”
The court heard that Gittings was currently serving lengthy sentences imposed in Sussex and Kent in 2021 for dealing drugs. In 2020, she'd been found in a house in Bognor Regis with £12,000-worth of heroin and crack cocaine.
Olivia Haggar, mitigating, told the Oxford judge: “She’s clearly not covered herself in glory in respect of the drug dealing convictions [but] it was stacked against her from birth, really.”
The defendant’s parents had both been drug addicts and she was born with a dependence on class As.
She had moved from house to house as a child, living in some places that were ‘wholly unsuitable for habitation’.
Gittings, of HMP Peterborough, pleaded guilty to possession of a prohibited weapon and possession of 0.7g of heroin found in her clothing when she was arrested.
Judge Pringle said the offences would normally attract a community order. But given her current incarceration, he said: “If I pass a community order or give you a fine, that can’t be paid until you are released. And when you are released, which I think is in 2024, I think it’s very much in your interest you are released with a clean slate.”
He gave her eight weeks’ imprisonment, to run alongside her current drugs sentence.
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