CRIMINAL CASE NO. 33 OF 2010
COURT: The facts in this case are extremely short and, unfortunately, quite typical of these types of matters.
On the morning of 12 August last year, you were seen around a building in Tsing Yi Estate. You came to the attention of two police officers. They intercepted you inside a lift lobby on the ground floor of Yee Wai House. They searched you and, during that search, they found the drugs which, after analysis, turned out to be 824.5 grammes of ketamine.
You were arrested and cautioned. You said you had arranged to meet somebody else and asked for a chance. You subsequently were interviewed and admitted that you knew that what you were carrying was ketamine. You have accepted that the street value of that is a little over $114,000.
You pleaded guilty at the first opportunity, on the committal proceedings in the Magistracy, but as you will well know given your past experience with drug convictions and because, so I am told, your counsel has advised you, there is a tariff that is applicable in respect of trafficking in this form of drugs. It is to be found in the decision of the Court of Appeal in Secretary for Justice v Hii Siew Cheng and it prescribes, for between 600 and 1,000 grammes of ketamine, a period of imprisonment of between 12 and 16 years.
You had almost exactly halfway between those two limits. I think the amount over 800 grammes that you had is sufficiently small that I would be entitled to take 13 years as the starting point, rather than trying to arithmetically refine it to a number of weeks as well.
The question I ask myself, really, is whether you have yet reached the stage where you should receive an enhanced starting point because of your continual re-offending. You have 13 previous convictions, of which eight relate to drugs, two of those being trafficking in drugs. You are not the naïve young person that it may have been thought until such time as I was handed your criminal record, after your mitigation.
I see that in 2002, in 2004 and again in 2007, you were committed to Drug Addiction Treatment Centre: so you have been committed three times to DATC. I know that you would not be committed to that institution unless you were found to be drug-dependent.
It is marginal whether I would be entitled to increase the starting point at this stage and, that being so, it is probably inappropriate for me to do so. But you can consider yourself on notice that if, when you are released, you re-offend involving drugs, there is every reason for you to expect that, next time round, an enhanced starting point will be taken by the court.
Your plea of guilty entitles you to a one-third reduction from a starting point of 13 years. That reduces the sentence to 8 years and 8 months. There is nothing in your personal circumstances or in the circumstances of the offence which entitles you to any further reduction. That is the sentence you are to serve.