COURT: Defendant, you have pleaded guilty to a single charge of trafficking in a dangerous drug, contrary to section 4(1)(a) and (3) of the Dangerous
Drugs Ordinance, Cap. 134, Laws of Hong Kong, the particulars being that you, on 6 April of last year, at the Customs Arrival Hall at Hong Kong International Airport, unlawfully trafficked in 1.46 kilos of a viscous liquid containing 0.86 of a kilogram of cocaine.
The Summary of Facts, which you have agreed, are straightforward and confirm that you arrived on the date mentioned in the charge on a flight from Doha and, whilst nothing was found in your baggage, it was suspected that you had concealed drugs inside your body and you were taken to hospital. There, you excreted a total of 40 packets containing the drugs being the subject matter of the charge.
You are a Colombian national of 47 years of age, with two young children born to your partner. This is an all too familiar and tragic story of you succumbing to the temptation of acting as a mule to carry these drugs into Hong Kong. I am told that you, after some persuasion, swallowed these drugs contained in condoms and were to receive a reward of something in the order of US$3,000. The retail value of these drugs is some HK$1.7 million.
Your counsel has realistically pointed out that the only real mitigation here is your plea of guilty and I will afford you the full discount in sentence to reflect that.
The guidelines for trafficking in quantities of between 600 to 1,200 grammes of cocaine are contained in the case of HKSAR v Abdallah Anwar Abbas and fall between 20 to 23 years’ imprisonment on conviction after trial. In this case, the court is dealing with 860 grammes of narcotic. Accordingly, I take as my starting point a sentence of 21 years’ imprisonment.
There is obviously an aggravating feature here in that you imported these drugs into Hong Kong, that being, obviously, an international element. In order to take account of this, I will increase that starting point by 12 months, coming to 22 years’ imprisonment.
I give you the full one-third discount in sentence to reflect your plea of guilty, arriving at a sentence of 14 years and 8 months’ imprisonment.