COURT: I do not propose to keep you in suspense. You are going to prison for 6 years. When I have left court, your lawyers will explain to you when you are likely to be released from prison, bearing in mind the rules about remission and the length of time you have been in custody.
You have to be sentenced for trafficking in the drugs found on you at the time of your arrest, and for trafficking in the drugs found shortly afterwards in the flat in which you were living with your girlfriend, now your wife. However, following your arrest, you told the police that you had been delivering drugs for someone who you did not name for four months, and that you were paid about $1,500 for each delivery you made. It was in the light of that admission that at one stage you faced an additional charge of conspiring to traffic in dangerous drugs, a charge which reflected your course of dealing over the four months during which you were making deliveries of drugs for the person you did not name. But that charge was no longer proceeded with, and I therefore deal with you only for the drugs found on you and in your flat.
That does not mean that I should ignore the background of how you came to traffic in them. They were drugs which you were going to deliver for payment. Indeed, your responsibilities in this operation involved not just delivering the drugs but packing them as well. I shall return to that shortly, but 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 their narcotic content. The weight of the narcotic content of the drugs in your case was 49.84 grammes of cocaine and 139.57 grammes of ketamine. I acknowledge that had you been arrested a week earlier or a week later, the quantities of drugs you would have had may have been less. It was therefore a matter of chance that when you and your flat were searched, there happened to be these quantities of drugs in total. But what was on you and in your flat at the time of your arrest is the only basis on which the court can sentence you.
The sentencing guideline for cocaine says that the appropriate range for someone who is convicted of trafficking in 10 to 50 grammes of cocaine is 5 to 8 years’ imprisonment. The sentencing guideline for ketamine says that the appropriate sentence for someone who is convicted of trafficking in 50 to 300 grammes of ketamine is 6 to 9 years’ imprisonment. These are the appropriate ranges of sentence for someone who has been convicted after pleading not guilty. On a purely arithmetical approach, that would have resulted in your case in a notional starting point for sentence of 8 years’ imprisonment for the cocaine and about 7 years’ imprisonment for the ketamine.
The guidelines to which I have referred were set for defendants who are involved in trafficking at the lowest level of culpability, namely as a courier or a storekeeper. The Court of Appeal has recently identified the hierarchy of roles of those who traffic in dangerous drugs. This is where I must return to what you were actually doing, though there is an unfortunate gap in the evidence here. The Summary of Facts does not say whether you admitted to whom the drugs were to be delivered. Were you admitting that you had been delivering drugs to the end-user, perhaps being paid by them and then accounting to the person who engaged you for the money you received less the $1,500 you earned for each delivery? Or were you admitting that you had been delivering drugs simply to the next person in the chain of distribution by which the drugs eventually reached their ultimate consumer?
The distinction is important. The latter would come within the category of courier, but the former would come within the next more culpable category, that of the actual trafficker dealing direct with the end-user. However, in the absence of an admission or evidence that you were delivering drugs to the ultimate consumer, as opposed to someone who represented the next link in the chain, I have to sentence you on the supposition which is the most favourable to you; in other words, that you were simply acting as a courier. However, since you were engaged as a packer of drugs as well as a courier, I place your culpability between that of a courier pure and simple and someone dealing with the end-user. Enhancing your sentence to take into account your role in packing the drugs in addition to delivering them, I propose to enhance the notional starting points I have identified to 8½ years’ imprisonment for the cocaine and to 7½ years’ imprisonment for the ketamine.
However, it would not be fair if I simply took the appropriate sentence for each of the drugs and then aggregated them. The fairer and more realistic approach is to take the appropriate sentence which would have been passed for the more potent drug, in this case the cocaine, if you had had to be sentenced just for that, and then to take into account the fact that you were trafficking in ketamine as well. In that context, I have borne in mind that the Court of Appeal has said that trafficking in a variety of drugs is an aggravating factor, but at the same time, I must be careful not to sentence you twice over for the same thing.
I have also borne in mind what the Court of Appeal has said about the various tests - the absurdity test, the conversion test, and the ratio test - for checking whether the overall starting point which the court has in mind in cases such as yours where the offender has been convicted of trafficking in more than one drug is broadly correct. I have also borne in mind the principle of totality which requires me to stand back and check that the overall sentence is not disproportionate to the totality of your offending.
In the light of all these considerations, I propose to take 9½ years as my overall starting point. But that is only the starting point. I cannot ignore the fact that this is the first time 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, especially as your family say that there is much good in you. In all the circumstances of the case, I propose to reduce the overall starting point to 9 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 overall sentence which I propose to pass on you is one of 6 years’ imprisonment. The sentence which I pass on the 1st charge is one of 4 years’ imprisonment. The sentence which I pass on the 2nd charge is one of 6 years’ imprisonment. You will serve each of those terms concurrently with each other, making 6 years in all.