UK Court Dismisses Chichester CBD Case After Improper Testing & Handling By Sussex Police | Cannabis Law Report | How to order Skittles Moonrock online

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A UK Crown Court has thrown out criminal charges against CBD hemp flower importers after ruling that police mishandled evidence and used improper testing methods, but only after a five-and-a-half-year ordeal that destroyed the defendants’ businesses and forced them to relocate abroad.

While the win offers a potential defence for other hemp importers facing similar prosecutions, the UK’s exit from the European Union has meant hemp businesses are now ‘more vulnerable than ever’.

Joseph Musumeci, former director of Chichester-based Buds R Us, and his former business partner Sean Osborne saw police raid their premises, freeze their bank accounts, and label them an organised crime group before misplacing the seized evidence for four years.

When authorities finally tested the products in April 2025, just weeks before trial, they failed to follow mandatory EU testing protocols. While Judge David Melville found that continuity of the evidence had been established despite the police’s poor handling, he ruled that the improper testing methods made the evidence inadmissible.

The July 2025 ruling marks the first time a UK court has excluded cannabis test results specifically on the grounds that police failed to comply with EU Regulation 639/2014 Annex III, the mandatory testing protocol for determining THC content in hemp products during the period when the UK was subject to European law.

The Case and Its Collapse

The prosecution began when parcels containing CBD hemp flower were intercepted by customs and Border Force in late 2019 and early 2020.

“We were stocking around 70 shops from West Sussex to Scotland. Things were going great, then we had parcels seized by customs,” Musumeci explained. “It wasn’t anything unusual because it looks like cannabis, but in mainland Europe normally they test it and then see that it is CBD hemp.”

Musumeci says he has had CBD flower seized, tested, and returned, usually within a few weeks in other European countries, including the Czech Republic, Germany, France, and Austria.

“Nowhere else but in the UK have we been subjected to such heavy-handed treatment and gross misconduct by the police.”

However, Royal Mail postal workers took packages they said smelled of cannabis to Sussex Police, the hemp was immediately treated as cannabis and a criminal investigation was launched.

This saw them seize approximately 50kg of product and trigger charges of cannabis importation and conspiracy to supply a controlled substance against Musumeci, Osborne, and five others.

Despite the business owners explaining their products were legal CBD hemp under EU law and repeatedly requesting tests to prove this, Musumeci says they were refused.

“Everything was registered. But they didn’t bother testing the stuff for at least a year… They were saying it didn’t matter what the THC level was, that any flower or hemp was illegal. That was nonsense at the time because we were part of the European Union and protected by the free movement of goods under Article 36,” Musumeci recalled.

“The police came down on all of us really hard. They raided several addresses, froze all our bank accounts, shut the website down, seized assets… everything.”

Police labelled the defendants as an organised crime group and proceeded with criminal charges without testing the seized material, before apparently misplacing the evidence.

The seized hemp flowers went missing and remained unaccounted for until February 2025, nearly four years after the seizure. Testing was not conducted until April 2025, just weeks before the trial commenced, forcing the defence to prepare without knowing what the prosecution’s scientific case would be.

During cross-examination by defence counsel Charles Langley KC, Detective Constable Holmes was confronted with evidence that police had lost nine different exhibits in the case. When questioned about the missing evidence, DC Holmes insisted the exhibits “were not completely missing… they were not where we would expect them to be”.

The case dragged on for five and a half years, during which time the defendants’ businesses collapsed under the weight of frozen assets, criminal charges, and the inability to operate.

When the prosecution finally presented test results showing THC levels of 0.3% and 0.4%, the defence challenged both the chain of custody and, critically, the testing methodology used by prosecution expert Jagdish Patel of Eurofins Forensic Services.

In a voir dire hearing (a trial within a trial where the judge determines whether evidence is admissible), Patel admitted under cross-examination by Langley that Eurofins had not followed the EU’s Annex III testing protocol in several material respects. The laboratory used methanol instead of the prescribed squalane reagent, failed to grind samples as required, used different sample sizes, did not apply centrifugal force as mandated, and reported results to only one decimal place rather than the required two.

Most significantly, Patel conceded that ‘had he used the methods appearing in Annex III one may get different results and one would not know the differences unless the tests were performed side by side,’ according to Judge Melville’s written ruling.

Patel also acknowledged he had never tested for low THC content before and that his laboratory’s accreditation testing showed percentage differences from scheme test scores of 17.34% and 22.48%, variations that take on greater significance when measuring THC levels near the 0.2% legal threshold.

Judge Melville ruled that the prosecution was ‘obliged to test the exhibits according to Annexe III’ and had ‘failed to do so.’ He concluded that admitting the flawed test results would have ‘an adverse effect on the fairness of the case.’

In his written ruling, the judge was unsparing in his assessment of the authorities’ conduct: “The prosecution has brought this situation entirely upon itself having lost/mislaid the exhibits for at least four years and then going about their testing regime in a way they could have easily avoided by reference to Annex III.”

Following the ruling, the prosecution offered no evidence against all seven defendants, and the judge directed the jury to return not guilty verdicts on all counts.

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