COURT: I do not propose to keep you in suspense. You are going to prison for 18 years. When I have left court, your lawyers 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 working for Lee Ka-lok for the previous 10 months or so, with a break of one month during that period, delivering drugs for him to his customers which your counsel today has confirmed were the end users. You said that this had only started because you had got into debt to Lee, and working for him was the only way that you would be able to pay off that debt. Nor do you appear to have made much money out of this if the Summary of Facts is anything to go by.
Although you would at all times have been anxious to minimise your role in Lee’s operation, I have not seen
anything which seriously contradicts what you told the police, nor anything which contradicts your claim that it was on Lee’s instructions that you were just collecting the parcel sent to Hong Kong from Hungary. In the circumstances, the factual basis on which I propose to sentence you is that for the 10 months or so that you were working for Lee you were delivering drugs to the users themselves, being paid by them, and then accounting to Lee for the money you received, less the commission which Lee was paying you.
It was the work which you did for Lee which constituted the first of the four charges which you have admitted. That is the charge of conspiring to traffic in dangerous drugs. The other three charges relate to substantive offences. Charge 2 relates to the ketamine concealed in a jacket and two pairs of shoes within the parcel sent from Hungary. Charge 3 relates to cocaine and ketamine which were found in a room in an industrial building in Tuen Mun where you stored the drugs. Charge 4 relates to cocaine, ketamine, herbal cannabis and a relatively small number of tablets of MDMA which were found in a flat which you rented where you lived with your girlfriend and which you also used to store drugs. Your counsel accepts that an offence of attempting to traffic in a particular quantity of a particular drug such as the offence in Charge 2 carries the same sentence as an offence of trafficking in the same quantity of the same drug.
You will have been told that the Court of Appeal has laid down guidelines for the appropriate sentence for people who traffic in drugs. The guidelines are based on their narcotic content. The weight of the narcotic content of the drugs in your case was about 1,725 grammes of cocaine, about 3,774 grammes of ketamine, and about 1,987 grammes of herbal cannabis. I acknowledge that had you been arrested a week earlier or a week later, the quantities of the drugs you would have had may have been less. It was, therefore, a matter of chance that when the parcel was opened and the storeroom in your flat was searched, there happened to be these quantities of drugs in total. But what was in the parcel, the storeroom and the flat is the only basis on which the court can sentence you on Charges 2, 3 and 4.
Charge 1 is, of course, more difficult. It represents your course of dealing over a specified period. There is no evidence of the quantities of drugs you delivered for Lee during that period, save for what you told the police about having been paid a specific amount depending on the weight of each consignment, and your claim to the police borne out, broadly speaking, by your bank statements that Lee had paid you something in the region of $60,000 in all for your services. In these circumstances, I propose to enhance your overall sentence by a modest amount to reflect your trafficking in drugs over and above the particular drugs referred to in Charges 2, 3 and 4.
The sentencing guideline for cocaine says that the appropriate range for someone who is convicted of trafficking in 1,200 to 4,000 grammes of cocaine is 23 to 26 years’ imprisonment. The relevant case relating to ketamine says that the appropriate sentence for someone who is convicted of trafficking in more than 3,000 grammes of ketamine could exceed 20 years’ imprisonment, although the sentence should not necessarily approximate to an arithmetical calculation based on by how much the weight of the ketamine exceeded 3,000 grammes. And the most recent case relating to herbal cannabis says that 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.
It would not be fair if I simply took the appropriate sentence for each of the drugs and then aggregated them. The fairer and more realistic approach is to take the longest sentence which would have been passed for the drugs you were trafficking in if you had to be sentenced just for that, in this case the cocaine, and then to take into account the fact that you were trafficking in ketamine and herbal cannabis as well. I propose to ignore the few tablets of MDMA you were trafficking in as they would add hardly anything to your overall sentence.
The guideline and cases to which I have referred were 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 someone who was delivering drugs to Lee’s customers, your role was more than that of a courier who was simply passing the drugs on to the next person in the chain of distribution by which the drugs eventually got to the ultimate user, but less than someone who managed or organised the operation. This means that there has to be some enhancement of what would otherwise have been the appropriate sentence according to the guideline and the cases to which I have referred.
Had I been sentencing you for the cocaine alone, I would have taken 25 years’ imprisonment as my starting point. Had I been sentencing you for the ketamine alone, I would have taken 22 years’ imprisonment as my starting point. And had I been sentencing you for the herbal cannabis alone, I would have sentenced you to 18 months’ 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. I must also bear in mind the principle of totality which requires me to step back and check that the overall sentence is not disproportionate to the totality of your offending.
In the light of the role that you played in Lee’s operation, above that of a courier or storeman, the quantity and variety of the drugs you were trafficking in, and the fact that you were trafficking in drugs over a period of about 10 months, albeit with an interval of about a month, which included trafficking in at least some drugs over and above the particular drugs to which Charges 2, 3 and 4 relate, I propose to take 27 years’ imprisonment as my overall starting point. In deciding on that overall starting point, I have taken into account two additional things. First, there is the fact that you have never been in trouble before, save for an offence of theft, agreed to have been a case of theft by finding, for which you received a modest fine. Secondly, I have borne in mind what the Court of Appeal has said about the various tests, that is the absurdity test, the conversion test, and the ratio test, for checking whether the overall starting point which the court has in mind in cases such as yours, where the offender has been convicted of trafficking in more than one drug, 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 overall sentence I propose to pass on you is one of 18 years’ imprisonment.
I need to identify the sentences passed on each charge, bearing in mind that the charges involve different drugs in different quantities. On Charge 1 the sentence is 14 years’ imprisonment. On Charge 2 the sentence is 12 years’ imprisonment. On Charge 3 the sentence is 15 years’ imprisonment. And on Charge 4 the sentence is 18 years’ imprisonment. All these sentences will be served concurrently with each other making 18 years’ imprisonment in all.