A judge who was feeling in a festive mood has allowed a drug-smuggling grandmother bail so she can organise her affairs before he sentences her.

Priscilla Delores Williams, 60, is facing a possible jail sentence after a Supreme Court jury convicted her of importing and possessing more than $8,000 worth of cannabis.

The jurors acquitted the defendant, who is a Rastafarian, of intending to supply the 163.9 grams of the drug that she brought into Bermuda from Jamaica hidden in a case of rum.

Granting defence barrister Elizabeth Christopher?s application for bail for her client, Puisne Judge Carlisle Greaves said: ?This is Christmas and you see I?m wearing red, and wearing white on my head. I must be in some kind of Father Christmas spirit. She?s at that age where I will allow her to get her business straight.?

He therefore allowed Williams, of Bulkhead Drive, Warwick, $10,000 bail with a surety and warned her not to attempt to leave the country.

The court had earlier heard the defendant claim she had no idea the liquor box she carried off a Planet Airlines charter flight into Bermuda International Airport on January 5 contained drugs in a hidden compartment.

She testified that a person named Noel White whom she met while on a Christmas holiday at the Gloriana Hotel in Montego Bay, Jamaica, asked her to bring the box back for a woman named April Showers. She stated that she had at no point looked in the box but that she had believed it to contain wine.

All the passengers coming in on her flight were searched, and a Police drugs dog alerted the authorities to the fact that Williams was carrying drugs.

Before the jury panel of six men and six women retired to consider their verdicts yesterday afternoon, Crown counsel Oonagh Vaucrosson told them to ignore Williams?s claims of ignorance.

?It?s all a fabrication ? something to try to hoodwink you from the fact that the defendant knew all along what was in that box,? she said.

But Miss Christopher urged them to acquit her client, saying: ?She?s a Rastafarian. Sometimes Rastafarians have an association with drugs. Don?t say she?s guilty just because she?s a Rastafarian. This is not a sophisticated traveller, this is a woman who has not travelled in 30 years and one shouldn?t be too surprised that she didn?t look in the box and just went about her business.?

However, the jury convicted a sobbing Williams of the importation and possession charges by a majority of nine to three after deliberating for just over two hours.

Mr. Justice Greaves ordered that a Social Inquiry Report should be prepared on the defendant before she is sentenced, and listed her case for mention at Supreme Court on January 3, 2006