CRIMINAL CASE NO. 32 OF 2011
COURT: You have pleaded guilty to trafficking in 106.96 grammes of heroin hydrochloride. You were stopped and searched on your return from Shenzhen to Hong Kong at the Lok Ma Chau Control Point on 25 July 2010. In due course, you were brought before a magistrate and at your committal on 21 January of 2011, you pleaded to a charge of trafficking.
You must have known the seriousness of your position because you have a terrible record having been before the courts on no less than 20 occasions since 1979. It is clear that you have been a drug addict at least since 1989 when you were fined for possession of dangerous drugs and, the next year, sent to a Drug Addiction Treatment Centre.
But this record is not simply the record of someone addicted to a drug and using it himself. You have been to prison before for trafficking in dangerous drugs in 1991 when you received sentences totalling 4 years and 1 month in the District Court and 12 years’ imprisonment in 1998 in the High Court.
In 2002 and 2007, you received further periods of imprisonment for offences of possession of dangerous drugs, notwithstanding that you only came out of prison on 25 June 2005. You, of all people, must know firsthand the destruction which is wrought on the lives of others by what you are trafficking and you must realise the serious consequences of your actions when you are caught.
The starting point, if I adopted a strictly mathematical approach in your case, for 106.96 grammes of heroin hydrochloride would be 9½ years’ imprisonment. However, from the facts I have just recited and your record, there are two aggravating factors which I should bear in mind in your case in accordance with the Court of Appeal decision of Abdallah Anwar Abbas, Criminal Appeal No. 304/2008, the judgment of which was delivered on 12 March 2009.
The first is that there is an international element in the trafficking of drugs in your case by virtue of your trafficking across the border from the mainland (see paragraph 30 of the Abbas case). The second is that you have previously been convicted and sentenced for two very serious offences of trafficking in drugs, particularly the latter conviction in 1998 (see paragraph 42 of the Abbas judgment).
In my judgment, bearing these aggravating features in mind, but also that the quantities involved in this case are significantly less than the quantities in Abbas and that the suggested enhancement in that case should be correspondingly less in this, the starting point which I take for sentence in your case is 10 years’ imprisonment. A straight one-third discount for plea will bring your sentence to 6 years and 8 months.
So far as mitigation is concerned, there is really little that can be said, except that you pleaded guilty at the first available opportunity in the Magistrates Court rather than when the case arrived in the High Court, and that a small proportion of the drugs might have been for your own reward and consumption rather than for trafficking to other people, although the mere fact of importing drugs over the border is trafficking in itself. For those reasons and the mitigation presented on your behalf by Miss Campbell-Moffat, I will trim the sentence very slightly from 6 years 8 months to 6 years 6 months.
The sentence of the court is that you should go to prison for 6½ years.