Southsada Sananikone: 81yo drug trafficker loses bid to overturn conviction
An elderly woman who claimed she had no idea her daughter was helping her run a lucrative dark web drug trafficking business has lost her bid to overturn the conviction.
Southsada Sananikone, 81, was sentenced to three months in prison in August last year after a jury found him guilty of a single charge of illegal drug trafficking.
Sentencing Judge Robyn Harper said Sananikone would be sentenced on the grounds that she was “willfully blind” to her daughter’s drug trafficking empire, even though she claimed she was “oblivious”.
But the Melbourne woman, who was shamed by the local Buddhist community after being charged by police, has appealed her conviction to Victoria’s highest court.
At the trial in August this year, Sananikone argued that the jury unreasonably rejected his claim that he did not know what he was participating in was illegal activity.
The court was told that over a five-week period in early 2022, Sananikone mailed 396 parcels to various AusPost post offices in the name of his daughter, Mimi Sananikone, 49.
Police seized 255 packages, each of which was found to contain illegal drugs such as methamphetamine, cocaine, MDMA, opium, testosterone and heroin.
The couple were arrested by police on February 23, 2023, and their home in Hughesdale was searched.
Investigators found $461,000 in cash, including $80,000 sitting on a coffee table, and bulk drugs and drug packaging equipment hidden around their home.
In a police statement, Sananikone said through an interpreter that he had just left home to “go to work as usual” but did not know what was inside the packages.
“I just thought it was a legal thing. You know, I – I – it’s kind of a job, I – I do it. I work. I don’t know anything about it,” he said.
The court was told Mimi Sananikone ran legitimate businesses outside the home, including selling tea, seaweed and mushrooms.
Sananikone’s lawyers argued that these legitimate dealings led to an explanation of his actions consistent with innocence, namely that he believed he was assisting his daughter with legal work.
They argued that there was no criminal connection between Sananikone and the drugs, and Mimi claimed that Sananikone “hid her drug business very well from her mother.”
But Justices Lesley Taylor, Rowena Orr and Peter Kidd, who delivered their decision at the Court of Appeal this month, found Sananikone’s guilt was “the only reasonable inference open”.
The judges found that the high volume of parcel movements and significant cash holdings entitled the jury to conclude that Sananikone was smuggling drugs.
“These issues taken together led to the conclusion that the applicant was at least aware that the substantial business was dealing in illicit substances and was willfully blind to the risk that the packages contained drugs of addiction,” they wrote.
“The jury was entitled to think that any suggestion that the applicant’s daughter had amassed more than $450,000 in cash by selling large quantities of tea and mushrooms to family members and friends – and that the applicant might have thought that was the case – was absurd.”
Mimi Sananikone is serving an 18-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to charges of drug trafficking, dealing with proceeds of crime and possessing other people’s personal information.
