COURT: I do not propose to keep you in suspense. You are going to prison for 6 years. When I have left court, Mr Chan 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.
You have to be sentenced on the basis that you are a relatively low-level dealer in hard drugs like cocaine, ice, ketamine and ecstasy, selling them to end users, perhaps to feed your own drug habit. That this was your trade cannot really be doubted in view of the paraphernalia found in the car you were using. That paraphernalia included a quantity of empty resealable plastic bags and some electronic weighing scales. In addition, the drugs which you had on you were themselves in various plastic bags ready to be sold to the ultimate consumer.
You will have been told that the Court of Appeal has laid down guidelines for the appropriate sentences for people who traffic in dangerous drugs. The guidelines are based on the amounts 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 about 55 grammes of cocaine, about 20 grammes of ketamine, about 30 grammes of herbal cannabis, less than 2 grammes of ecstasy and a tiny amount of ice. I acknowledge that had you been arrested a week earlier or a week later, the quantities of the drugs you might then have had may have been less. It was therefore a matter of chance that on this occasion you happened to have on you these quantities of drugs. But what you had on you at the time of your arrest is the only basis on which the court can sentence you.
The guidelines say that the appropriate range for someone who is convicted of trafficking in between 50 and 200 grammes of cocaine is 8 to 12 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. The appropriate range for someone who is convicted of trafficking in up to 10 grammes of ice is 3 to 7 years’ imprisonment. The appropriate range for someone who is convicted of trafficking in between 1 and 10 grammes of ecstasy is 2 to 4 years’ imprisonment. And the appropriate sentence for someone who is convicted of trafficking in under 2,000 grammes of herbal cannabis is up to 16 months’ imprisonment. These are the appropriate ranges and sentences for someone who has been convicted after pleading not guilty.
You are the classic small-time, street-level dealer in drugs, but 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. 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 - in this case the cocaine - 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 cocaine 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 of those who traffic in dangerous drugs. As a small-time dealer, you come above the courier or storekeeper in terms of culpability. Had I been sentencing you for trafficking in the cocaine alone, I would therefore have taken something a little over 8 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, the fact that the quantities of ketamine, ecstasy, ice and herbal cannabis were all at the lower ends of the appropriate ranges, and the fact that this is not the first time that you are having to go to prison for your involvement with drugs, I propose to take 9 years’ imprisonment as my starting point. In deciding upon that starting point, I have borne in mind that your previous conviction for trafficking in dangerous drugs was in 2011 and your sentence was a relatively short one. I have also borne in mind what the Court of Appeal has 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 this offence of trafficking in dangerous drugs is 6 years’ imprisonment.