COURT: You arrived at the airport here on 30 November last year.
Correctly, Customs officer suspected that you might have contraband concealed inside your body. You were taken to the hospital. From your arrival there over the next four days you excreted a total of 56 pellets which contained 380 grammes of heroin hydrochloride.
That has a value in Hong Kong of well over half a million Hong Kong dollars.
You pleaded guilty when you appeared in the Magistracy. You wrote a letter to the court on 15 May setting out why you committed this offence, which effectively is that you sought to support yourself and your family by starting a small business, which was unsuccessful; that as a result, you got into debt. The person who loaned you the money you describe as “having no sense of humour” and apparently even subjected you to some level of violence in order to get repayment, and you were offered a financial reward for bringing these drugs into Hong Kong that would extinguish your debt.
You describe your decision as “crazy, risky and ridiculous”. That is a very good description of it.
You have been told that the courts in Hong Kong take a very serious view of people bringing drugs in. Perhaps one of the reasons the sentences are substantial here is because if you take them into many other countries in Asia, you are facing the death penalty, which we no longer have here. As challenging as I realise life would have been for you, and as deserving of empathy your personal situation was in Tanzania, it does not amount to any justification for reducing the ultimate sentence.
The quantity of drugs which you had, 380 grammes, falls almost at the very top of the fourth sentencing band, which deals with quantities between 200 and 400 grammes. That prescribes a period of imprisonment of between 12 and 15 years.
I will take 15 after trial as the starting point. It is now sentencing practice to enhance the sentence for the fact that you imported the drugs into Hong Kong; what is called the international element. The current level of enhancement for less than a kilogram is that the practice has arisen that that attracts a 12-month period of enhancement. That makes a total of 16 years after trial.
You are entitled to a one-third discount from that because of your plea of guilty. That amounts to a reduction of 5 years and 4 months.
That results in a sentence of 10 years and 8 months, but in recognition of the fact that the amount of drugs was slightly under 400 grammes, the final sentence which I order you to serve is 10 years and 6 months.
I am sure you have probably been told that the period you have spent in custody will be credited towards the sentence you are to serve.