Inside the Brisbane warehouse, police found a television, modem and sombrero.

It found the jury was given inadequate instructions and some evidence left doubts about his knowledge of drugs.

The Colombian, who came to Australia in 2016 on a student visa, gave evidence that he rented the warehouse in 2020 to further his long-term ambitions of opening a gym, court papers say.

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A friend of a friend later arranged to rent out a space to store auto parts, offering to pay him $2,000 to store five parts that would require storage for a maximum of four days. He agreed, later telling the court he believed the man was buying and selling expensive parts and was told the consignment had come from Melbourne.

He claimed he was given a phone number and told he would be contacted via secure chat regarding the arrival of car parts as they were expensive.

The friend used the name “Snoop” on Ciphr’s phone to contact Pastor Pastor, who used the name “Eros 911”, along with another person using the name “Prodigy”, where they discussed delivering a shipment to a facility in the West End.

Pastor Pastor eventually became doubtful about the cargo and began asking his friend why the man did not have his own warehouse for his business.

He says he was later threatened, along with his friends in Australia and his family in Colombia, and he feared for his safety.

Pastor said after the threats he thought the car parts had been stolen in Melbourne and never thought the packages contained drugs or came from overseas.

The Crown’s case at trial was that he intended to assist in the commission of the importation.

But the Court of Appeal overturned the conviction, ruling he should be acquitted on the first charge of facilitating the importation of a border-controlled drug and should be retried on the second charge of attempting to possess a commercial quantity of the drug. and highlighted the deficiencies with jury instructions.

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“The jury was not given any purposeful instructions that they were required to conclude that the only rational conclusion from the evidence was that (Pastor) knew the drugs were imported. This issue was either addressed briefly, without reference to the elements of the offense of importation, or the question of whether (he) knew about the presence of drugs in the car parts was omitted.”

The court held that without these adequate instructions and without instructions regarding a specific defense, the jury would obviously have had no difficulty in rejecting the man’s testimony.

“It cannot be assumed that their opinion would have been the same if they had been properly instructed. In any event, the failure to provide the jury with an available defense constitutes a miscarriage of justice,” the appellate judges said.

In the decision, the judges said communications between the group showed the man had little knowledge of what was going on at all.

“When the packages arrive… it is clear from his communications with Kennards that he has no idea of ​​the size or weight of the packages that will be delivered, and neither does Snoop,” the verdict states, highlighting that it appears the pastor The pastor was new to the organization.

“The evidence might convince a jury that (Pastor) knew the packages contained drugs, but that contradicts the Crown’s contention that he was likely to know the details of the criminal enterprise beyond those facts that directly affected him.”

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