COURT: The defendant, who is now aged 51, pleaded guilty in the Magistrates’ Court on 26 April 2013 to a charge of trafficking in a solid which contained 660 grams of methamphetamine hydrochloride. The defendant confirmed his plea of guilty before me on 4 July this year, and also agreed the summary of facts prepared by the prosecution. I was asked to adjourn the sentencing for perfectly understandable reasons, which is why there has been a gap in time between then and now.
But in short, the defendant was stopped on 28 October 2012 at the airport, just after he had checked in his luggage for a flight to Sydney. His luggage was then retrieved, but nothing of any relevance was found inside it. Later, he was asked to take off his shoes, and it was then that the drugs were found, one packet in each of the shoes that he was wearing.
The defendant explained that someone he called “Fat Keung” had given him what he called “the cold stuff”, a reference to “ice” as the drug in this case is commonly known. He said that Fat Keung had given this to him earlier in the day together with the shoes. He also told the authorities that he had been promised AUS$10,000 on his arrival in Australia.
In a later recorded interview, the defendant explained that he had owed Fat Keung HK$12,000, and that Fat Keung himself had paid for the defendant’s ticket to Australia. The defendant had also been given a SIM card so that he could be contacted after his arrival in Sydney. It was in this interview that the defendant said that he was going to be paid $10,000, but he went on to say that the currency of the money was not specified.
The defendant admitted that he was himself an abuser of both heroin and ice. The value of this consignment was just over $471,000.
Now, the defendant has 32 previous convictions, many of which are for drug-related offences. And the last of which was on 21 September 2012, when he was fined $3,000 for his six offences of possessing dangerous drugs and that, of course, was just a few weeks before the commission of the present offence.
The defendant has previously been in trouble for trafficking in dangerous drugs, albeit a considerable time ago. But for one such offence, he had received a 6 year sentence in the District Court; and for separate offences of trafficking, he received 18 months which was ordered to be served consecutively. Even a 7 and a half year sentence has failed to deter the defendant from re-offending in the same way.
Now, the principal aggravating factor in the present case is not so much those earlier trafficking convictions, because they were such a time ago. But it is the international element involved in the commission of the present crime, which makes this particularly serious.
In a very realistic and excellent mitigation speech, Mr Roderick Wu has accepted the sentencing guidelines which obviously he has advised his client about. It involves a long prison sentence and under those guidelines in the AG v Ching Kwok-hung reported at [1991] 2 HKLR at page 125, the tariff for the amount of methamphetamine hydrochloride above 600 grams in weight should range from 18 years and upwards.
In fact, taking into account the international element, the defendant’s previous bad record for similar offences and the fact that the quantity of ice was more than 600 grams, I would usually have considered the starting point of 19 years. Having regard to all the mitigation in this case with which I have been provided, and I am satisfied that here there was more than the usual element of remorse. I will of course give full credit for the timely plea of guilty and do not propose to add the extra year that I normally would.
So the starting point would be 18 years, and the sentence is reduced for your plea and other factors to 12 years imprisonment.