By Staff Reporter

Last updated at 11:45, Tuesday, 11 December 2012

A drug dealer was caught red-handed when police raided a Carlisle house looking for banned class A drugs.

Joseph Howarth, of no fixed address: Admitted possessing £1,000-worth of heroin with intent to supply it and was jailed for 32 months

Two women in the living room of the house in Levens Drive, Morton Park, were arrested, although it was later established they were not involved in anything illegal.

But when officers got as far as the kitchen they found “a startled male”, counting out his drugs money on the worktop.

Joseph Howarth, 22, who not long before had moved to Carlisle to make a new life for himself, was caught with a total of £1,400, all neatly laid out in £100 piles, alongside a white package containing heroin, prosecutor Dick Binstead said.

When he was restrained and arrested to prevent him hiding the evidence, another package fell out of the bottom of his trousers.

Howarth, of no fixed address, pleaded guilty to possessing £1,000-worth of heroin with intent to supply it. His barrister Carmel Wilde said Howarth had no previous convictions for drug-dealing and had been selling heroin for just a fortnight.

She said he was a hard-worker who had left his native Merseyside and come to Carlisle after he lost his job.

“He came here for a fresh start when his work dried up down there,” she said. “But he found himself in with the wrong crowd.”

Judge Paul Batty QC, at Carlisle Crown Court, sent Howarth to prison for 32 months.

He said he gave him a maximum discount for pleading guilty at a very early stage, although, he said, he did not have much choice since he had been caught red handed.

“I hope you will take the opportunity prison will give you to clean up your act,” he said.

First published at 11:39, Tuesday, 11 December 2012
Published by http://www.newsandstar.co.uk