COURT: I do not propose to keep you in suspense. You are going to prison for 7 years. When I have left court, Mr Wong will explain to you when you are likely to be released, bearing in mind the rules about remission of sentence and the length of time you have been in custody.
When you were arrested, you claimed that you had been engaged by someone you did not know to deliver these drugs for $1,000. You have not explained why this man selected you of all people for this job. This man who you did not know then entrusted these drugs, with an estimated street value in excess of $80,000, to you to take to an address which you did not identify. You have not explained why this man entrusted such a significant consignment of drugs to someone he did not know. On top of all that, you had almost $22,000 in cash on you at the time of your arrest, even though you were only earning $18,000 a month as a security guard.
You will not be surprised to hear that I am very sceptical about all of that. But the problem for me is that, if that is not the truth, I do not know what is. In the circumstances, I have to sentence you on a factual basis which is the most favourable to you while being at the same time consistent with the primary facts as I know them to be - that is, that you did know the man who recruited you but are not prepared to name him, that he knew you, and that you were delivering these drugs to an address which he told you about but which you are not prepared to name. I suspect that you are more heavily involved in the trafficking of drugs than you are prepared to admit. That would explain the sizeable amount of cash on you at the time of your arrest. However, that is mere suspicion, and I cannot proceed on the basis of suspicion alone. I have to proceed on the basis of proven facts or those facts which I can properly infer. I therefore have to sentence you on the basis that you were no more than a courier, and that this was an isolated occasion.
Your lawyers will have explained to you that the Court of Appeal has laid down guidelines for the appropriate sentence for people who traffic in drugs. The guidelines are based on the amount of drugs involved, although the court does not look at their weight as a whole. It focuses on the narcotic content of the drugs. The weight of the narcotic content of the drugs in your case was almost 60 grammes of ice, almost 50 grammes of ketamine and about 2 grammes of cocaine.
The guidelines say that the appropriate range for someone who is convicted of trafficking in between 10 and 70 grammes of ice is 7 to 11 years’ imprisonment; the appropriate range for someone who is convicted of trafficking in between 10 and 50 grammes of ketamine is 4 to 6 years’ imprisonment; and the appropriate range for someone who is convicted of trafficking in up to 10 grammes of cocaine is 2 to 5 years’ imprisonment. These are the appropriate ranges and sentences for someone who has been convicted after pleading not guilty.
It would not be fair if I simply took the appropriate sentence for each of the drugs you were trafficking in and then aggregated them. I agree with Mr Wong that the fairer and more realistic approach is to take the longest sentence which would have been passed for the drugs which you were trafficking in if you had to be sentenced just for them, which in this case was the ice, and then to take into account the fact that you were trafficking in a cocktail of other drugs.
The guideline for someone who is convicted of trafficking in ice was set for defendants who were involved in trafficking at the lowest level of culpability, namely, as a courier or storekeeper. The Court of Appeal has recently identified the hierarchy of roles for those who traffic in dangerous drugs. As someone who I am treating as having been engaged to deliver these drugs to the next person in the chain of distribution by which they would ultimately get to the end users, you were at the lowest level in terms of culpability. In the absence of an admission or evidence that you were doing anything more than that, the Court of Appeal has said that the appropriate guideline for couriers and storekeepers should be applied arithmetically. Accordingly, had I been sentencing you for trafficking in the ice alone, I would have taken something a little over 10 years’ imprisonment as my starting point. I bear in mind that the Court of Appeal has said that trafficking in a variety of drugs is an aggravating factor, but at the same time I must be careful not to sentence you twice over for the same thing.
In the light of the nature of your trafficking, the quantity and variety of the drugs you had on you, where the ketamine and cocaine were in the appropriate ranges in terms of their weight, the fact that this is the first time you had been in trouble, the fact that responsible members of the community speak about your resolve to turn your life around, and the fact that despite your disrupted childhood, you continue to have your family’s support as demonstrated by the presence here today of your mother and grandmother, I propose to take 10 years and 6 months’ imprisonment as my starting point. In deciding upon that starting point, I have also bore in mind what the Court of Appeal had said about the various ways of checking whether the starting point the court has in mind in cases such as these is broadly correct.
You are entitled, of course, to have your sentence reduced by one-third because of your plea of guilty on the return date when you were committed to the High Court for sentence. That means that the sentence which I pass on you for the offence of trafficking in dangerous drugs is 7 years’ imprisonment.