COURT: I don’t propose to keep you in suspense. You are going to prison for 8 years and 4 months. When I’ve left court, your lawyers will explain to you when you are likely to be released, bearing in mind our rules about remission of sentence and the length of time you’ve been in custody.
The presence in your home of empty resealable bags and a pair of electronic scales tells its own story. They are the paraphernalia associated with drug trafficking. They show that your role in this operation, by which hard drugs were to get onto the market, was something more than a mere storekeeper. They show that you were at least engaged in packaging them into suitable quantities to enable them to be sold on the street.
But going on the Summary of Facts, there is no evidence from which the court could infer that your role was higher up the distribution chain than that. In particular, there is no basis upon which I could say that you were selling the drugs yourself. The presence of a sizeable amount of cash in your home does not enable me to make that assumption, especially as the prosecution now accepts that the cash should be returned to you.
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 the weight of the narcotic content of the drugs involved. The weight of the narcotic content of the ice on you when you were arrested and in your home was 144.97 grammes.
I acknowledge that had you been arrested a week earlier or a week later, the quantity of the ice you would then have had may have been less. It was therefore a matter of chance that on the day of your arrest, there happened to be this amount of ice on you and in your home. But the amount that you had on you and in your home that day 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 70 and 300 grammes of ice is 11 to 15 years’ imprisonment. That is the appropriate range for someone who has been convicted after pleading not guilty.
So if the approach was a purely mechanical and mathematical one, you would be looking at a notional starting point for sentence of about 12 years’ and 3 months’ imprisonment.
But the exercise is more sophisticated than that. The guidelines 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 identified the hierarchy of roles of those who traffic in dangerous drugs. As someone who was packaging the ice yourself, your role was marginally more than that of the storekeeper looking after the ice for those higher up in the chain of command by which the ice eventually got to the ultimate consumer. This means that there has to be a modest enhancement of what would otherwise have been the notional starting point for sentence.
In the circumstances, I propose to take 12 years’ and 6 months’ imprisonment as the notional starting point for sentence. I do not increase the notional starting point to reflect the fact that you faced two counts of trafficking in dangerous drugs, those counts relating to the ice you had on you and the ice found in various parts of your home. I shall treat both counts as arising out of the same course of conduct (what is sometimes called “the one transaction rule”).
I turn to the mitigating factors. There is only one thing to be said on your behalf, and that is that it was intimated on your behalf in the Magistracy that you would be pleading guilty - and that was well before the date on which you
actually pleaded guilty and were committed to the High Court for sentence. That entitles you to have your sentence discounted by one-third.
Although you have previous convictions, this will be the first time that you have been sentenced to terms of imprisonment of immediate effect. Your record also suggests that you may have got in to trafficking in dangerous drugs as a result of your own addiction.
I know also about the devastating effect that your arrest and the prospect of a long sentence of imprisonment has had on your wife’s mental health, and I know that it will be some years before you can enjoy family life with your daughter who was born after your arrest. And I acknowledge that since your arrest, you have been trying to turn your life around by taking a course in food hygiene. But the courts have said that these things count for little when it comes to sentencing drug traffickers.
In all the circumstances of the case, I have concluded that the notional starting point in your case should be reduced to an actual sentence of 8 years’ and 4 months’ imprisonment.
To achieve that, the sentences which I pass are 4 years’ imprisonment on count 1 (which relates to the ice found on you) and 8 years’ and 4 months’ imprisonment on count 2 (which relates to the ice found in your home), those terms to be served concurrently with each other, making 8 years’ and 4 months’ imprisonment in all.
Finally, standing back and looking at those sentences as a whole in the light of the guidelines which I must of course respect, their totality represents, I think, a fair, just and balanced sentence in the circumstances of the case and your pleas of guilty.