Aminata Mansaray, 43, a trader from Culvert, Race Course in Freetown, stood before Honourable Justice Josephine F. Hinga at the Main Law Courts Building on 16th May 2026 and offered the court a simple explanation for the drugs found in her possession. The kush, she said, was not hers. She had been keeping it safe for someone.
The court was unmoved.
Justice Hinga sentenced Mansaray to thirty years imprisonment on each of two counts unlawful possession of a prohibited drug and dealing in prohibited drugs contrary to Sections 8(a) and 7(c) of the National Drugs Control Act No. 10 of 2008. Both sentences are to run concurrently.
The substance at the centre of the case was forensically examined by Inspector Steven Alpha Turay, a toxicologist attached to the Transnational Organised Crime Unit at TOCU Headquarters. His analysis revealed that the 56 wraps submitted for laboratory testing contained dried marshmallow leaves with a sticky texture and pungent odour, laced with Synthetic Cannabinoid Beam Solution the chemical signature of kush, a drug that has devastated communities across Sierra Leone in recent years.
Mansaray pleaded guilty and asked the court for mercy. Her defence counsel, M.Y. Conteh Esq., pressed the case for leniency with considerable force. He told the court that his client was a first-time offender, a mother of seven children, and had been arrested with her two-year-old child in tow. She had not wasted the court’s time. She had shown remorse.
Citing Section 12(3) of the National Drugs Control Act, Conteh argued for a minimum sentence of five years.
Justice Hinga acknowledged those mitigating factors the seven children, the guilty plea, the absence of prior convictions. She noted them formally in her reasoning. Then she sentenced Mansaray to thirty years.
In her address from the bench, the judge was direct about her reasoning. The offences, she said, did not harm only the immediate users of the drug. They threatened the country’s human capital the foundation upon which Sierra Leone’s future is being built.
Beyond the sentence itself, Justice Hinga issued two additional orders. She directed that the seized kush be destroyed in the presence of all relevant authorities, with a Certificate of Destruction to be filed with the court as a matter of record. She also ordered that Mansaray’s two-year-old child be placed in the care of the Ministry of Gender and Children’s Affairs, or with a certified relative of the convicted woman.
The case arrives at a moment of heightened national anxiety about kush in Sierra Leone. The synthetic drug cheap, accessible, and chemically unpredictable has become a public health emergency in Freetown’s poorer communities, prompting calls from civil society, health workers and government alike for stronger enforcement and more robust rehabilitation pathways.
Whether a thirty-year sentence for possession and dealing serves as a meaningful deterrent, or whether it reflects a justice system that is more comfortable with punishment than prevention, is a question that Mansaray’s case will likely continue to provoke.
For now, a 43-year-old mother of seven begins three decades in prison. Her two-year-old child goes to the state.
