COURT: I have to sentence you for trafficking in a dangerous drug. The drug was “Ice” and you were carrying 12.98 grammes of it. I needn’t explain to you how these courts go about sentencing drug traffickers according to guidelines, because you have been here before when you received a sentence of 10 years for trafficking only back in 2002.
Someone who has received a sentence of 10 years for drug trafficking who then goes and does it again obviously acts in a way that aggravates the crime, because such a person knows exactly the risks and knows exactly what will happen if they’re caught. It was done deliberately and with open eyes.
Before I heard your counsel in mitigation, it had been my intention to take a starting point and then increase it, because of the repetition of the serious drug trafficking, but, unusually for these drug cases - because there is normally nothing to say - there was something to say in mitigation in your case and the thrust of the mitigation is this: that you’d been to DATC for the first time and had stayed off drugs after that, you had a good job, a stable life, and that you trafficked these drugs not for the usual motive of profit, but because your girlfriend was an addict and it was done to mend the relationship.
Any judge hearing such mitigation asks him or herself, is this right or is an attempt being made to pull the wool over my eyes? I’ll never know for sure, but the fact is, those who plead guilty start with an advantage, because they have not spent their credibility telling lies to seek to avoid the consequences of their actions. What makes me judge that it is right to give weight to the mitigation advanced here is the attitude of your employer and the colleagues with whom you worked. I’ll give weight to what is said in the letter and I will give weight to the fact that you do have considerable support, because I can see the support by the attendance of those colleagues in this court today. That is sufficiently inconsistent with a picture of someone who has gone back to drugs and/or has chosen to start trafficking drugs for profit that I will countenance the mitigation advanced and give it weight.
You are lucky to have Mr Dunn as your counsel, because he is an advocate who judges very nicely just how to put it and what he urges upon me is that I leave you in the right bracket according to the guidelines, but at the bottom of it and that I don’t increase the sentence because of the repetition of the drug trafficking. In the circumstances, because I am giving weight to the mitigation, I will do that.
Accordingly, the starting point I take, having adjusted it for the mitigation, would be 7 years after trial. With the discount for the plea it produces a sentence of 4 years and 8 months and, with your record, I judge that’s the least sentence you could have hoped for.