CRIMINAL CASE NO. 200 OF 2010
COURT: I have to sentence you for trafficking in dangerous drugs. The drugs in question was heroin. And on 18 January of this year, you carried, having swallowed the pellets, the drugs from Malaysia into Hong Kong through the Hong Kong International Airport.
The amount involved was 649.94 grammes of heroin hydrochloride. It will have been explained to you that in Hong Kong for trafficking offences like this, courts, when it comes to sentence, follow guidelines based on the nature of the drug and the quantity of it. And the guideline in your case puts you in a bracket that starts at no less than 20 years’ imprisonment.
The court has to look to the fact that there is an international element to your crime and enhance the sentence in some degree for that.
The guidance in the recent case of Abbas talks of an enhancement of not less than two years in cases involving more than a kilo of heroin, and, of course, Mr Tolliday-Wright, on your behalf makes the point that, in your case, the amount is less than a kilo.
You pleaded guilty in the Magistrate’s court and obviously the major plank of your mitigation is the effect of the plea of guilty. You will know that these courts give one-third reduction for pleas of guilty and that one-third is the same under our system for men who plead guilty right at the last moment with a jury panel waiting outside and the witnesses waiting to give evidence. It is the same one-third for someone like you who pleads guilty right at the beginning in the Magistrate’s court.
So you will get your one-third but one of the other advantages though of pleading guilty so early is that when it comes to the narrow band of discretion that a court has it will probably err in your favour.
Therefore, when I come to start to calculate your sentence, rather than looking at anything in excess of 20 years, because the amount of drugs in this case in is excess of the 600 grammes, that is, the top end of the bracket, I shall not go into the bracket. I shall start at the bottom of it. So I shall look at a 20 year starting point that has to then be adjusted because of the international element.
Before hearing your counsel this morning, I had in mind to enhance the 20 years by a year which would have given a starting point overall of 21 years and the sentence after the third reduction for 14 years.
However, having heard Mr Tolliday-Wright and listening to his mitigation, and bearing in mind the fact that you pleaded early in the Magistrate’s court, I shall round that down and the sentence I shall pass is one of 13½ years.
You will appreciate that the discretion I have is limited. That is the case for good reason because consistency in these cases is important. But your case and the sentence I have just passed is designed to reflect the whole of the mitigation that has been advanced to me, whilst keeping your sentence in the bounds of consistency with other prisoners with whom you will be serving your sentence.
So the sentence is one of 13½ years, and I will add this. I do not think you could have hoped realistically for anything better.