Two accused of flying drones into prison appear in court today

Jensen La Vende 

Se­nior Re­porter 

[email protected] 

Af­ter be­ing de­tained a month ago on Pre­ven­tive De­ten­tion Or­ders (PDOs), two men ac­cused of fly­ing drones in­to pris­ons were charged on Sat­ur­day and are to ap­pear in court vir­tu­al­ly to­day.

The men, Ver­rell John­son and Johnathan David Al­bert, were iden­ti­fied in their PDOs as “main par­tic­i­pants in an or­gan­ised crim­i­nal en­ter­prise in­volv­ing the smug­gling of con­tra­band in­to a cor­rec­tion­al fa­cil­i­ty.”

The men were charged un­der Sec­tion 8(1) B of the Emer­gency Pow­ers Reg­u­la­tions, 2026, which speaks to the il­le­gal­i­ty of pro­hib­it­ed ar­ti­cles in a prison.

De­fence at­tor­ney Stef­fon Boodooram, who is rep­re­sent­ing Al­bert, said the month-long de­lay be­tween the de­ten­tion of his client and the charges is a breach of his con­sti­tu­tion­al rights.

“The con­tin­ued use of such or­ders in these cir­cum­stances amounts to an un­nec­es­sary and dis­pro­por­tion­ate in­fringe­ment of his con­sti­tu­tion­al right to per­son­al lib­er­ty. Pre­ven­tive De­ten­tion Or­ders are ex­cep­tion­al mea­sures and should not be used in a man­ner that un­der­mines the pre­sump­tion of in­no­cence or erodes the con­sti­tu­tion­al rights and free­doms guar­an­teed to every cit­i­zen.”

The duo is al­leged to have used the drones to smug­gle mo­bile phones, charg­ers, cig­a­rettes, il­le­gal nar­cotics, lighters and im­pro­vised weapons in­to a cor­rec­tion­al fa­cil­i­ty.

A PDO was or­dered for them as it was deemed nec­es­sary to dis­rupt plans to smug­gle the pro­hib­it­ed ar­ti­cles in­to the prison and to pre­vent them from act­ing in a man­ner prej­u­di­cial to pub­lic safe­ty.