COURT: I do not propose to keep you in suspense. You are going to prison for 4 years and 4 months. When I have left court, your lawyers will explain to you when you are likely to be released from prison, bearing the rules that we have about remission of sentence and the length of time you have been in custody.
When you were arrested, you said that some of the cocaine which you had left in the taxi was for your own use, and that you were intending to give the rest to a friend. You said that you had no one in particular in mind, and you were not expecting to be paid for it. You now accept that what you told the police was untrue. Although you had a dependence on drugs, none of this cocaine was for your own use nor were you going to give it to a friend. You now admit that you were taking it from one place to another, and for that service you were to be paid $1,000.
I am sceptical about that. I suspect that you were more heavily involved in the trafficking of drugs than you are prepared to admit. It would have been very bad luck if the taxi you had been stopped in had been the only occasion on which you were delivering drugs. However, that is mere suspicion, and I cannot proceed on the basis of suspicion. I have to proceed on the basis of proven facts or those facts which I can properly infer. I therefore sentence you on the basis that you were no more than a courier, and that this was an isolated occasion.
You will have been told that the Court of Appeal has laid down guidelines for the appropriate sentence for people who traffic in drugs. The guidelines are based on the narcotic quantity of the drugs. The weight of the narcotic quantity of the cocaine in your case was 39 grammes. The relevant guidelines says that the appropriate range for someone who is convicted of trafficking in between 10 and 50 grammes of cocaine is 5 to 8 years’ imprisonment. That is the appropriate range for someone who has been convicted after pleading not guilty.
The guidelines for someone who is convicted of trafficking in dangerous drugs were set for offenders who were involved in trafficking at the lowest level, namely, as a courier or storekeeper. The Court of Appeal has recently identified the hierarchy of roles of those who traffic in dangerous drugs. As someone who was engaged to deliver this cocaine to the next person in the chain of distribution by which the cocaine was ultimately to get to the ultimate consumer, you were at the lowest level of culpability. In the absence of an admission or evidence that you were doing anything other than that, the Court of Appeal has said that the appropriate guideline shouldn’t necessarily be applied arithmetically. In your case, that would have meant a starting point of a little over 7 years’ imprisonment.
But that is only the starting point. I cannot ignore your age. You were only 18 at the time and that means that you were more immature, more impressionable, and more easily influenced than someone older. Nor can I ignore the fact that this is the first time that you have been in trouble, or the fact that you speak eloquently about your resolve to turn your life around. I must do what I legitimately can to encourage that. In all the circumstances of the case, I propose to reduce the starting point to 6½ years’ imprisonment. You are entitled, of course, to have your sentence reduced by a further one-third because of your plea of guilty on the return date when you were committed to the High Court for sentence. That means that the sentence which I pass on you for this offence of trafficking in dangerous drugs is 4 years and 4 months’ imprisonment.