CRIMINAL CASE NO. 427 OF 2010
COURT: I have to sentence you for trafficking in a dangerous drug. The drug was cocaine and the amount of it can be described as staggering. It was 232 kilograms. Your role was to store it and I will act on that basis; nothing more, nothing less.
It would have been explained to you that sentences for drug‑trafficking are based on guidelines and those guidelines are based on the weight and nature of the drug. The guideline for cocaine follows that for heroin. The guideline brackets run out at an amount of 15 kilograms and that attracts a starting point of some 30 years’ imprisonment, after trial. The amount that you stored, of course, was many times that 15 kilograms. The sentencing is not entirely mathematical, though it gives much consideration to the weight of the drug.
Seizures of this size are rare. In a case called Ng Muk Kam the amount of heroin seized was 306 kilograms. The trial judge passed a sentence of life imprisonment but the Court of Appeal said that such sentences were reserved for the organisers or financiers and substituted a sentence of 35 years’ imprisonment. Realistically, the starting point in your case has to be somewhere between 33 and 35 years.
I have received a written mitigation from your counsel and I give weight to that, choosing to highlight the fact that you are 53 and, other than a very minor gambling which for practical purposes I ignore, you have no convictions. Not only that, you are a village representative and I have evidence from fellow villagers as well as your family of the unpaid and good work you did in that regard.
I do not know where the cocaine came from. It is unlikely that it originated in Hong Kong but I take the point into consideration that you are shown to have no proven link to any importation of the drug. In those circumstances I will act on the basis that your involvement is as asserted on your behalf and is not something that arises from you habitually acting, either alone or with those others involved, in really serious crime. It is the fact that you pleaded guilty immediately in the Magistrate’s Court and you came quietly with the police officers and co-operated right from the beginning.
Bearing in mind your role in the matter and the mitigation that I have referred to, I shall take a starting point of 33 years. That will result in a sentence, after the one-third discount, of 22 years’ imprisonment.
I am conscious that when you serve your sentence you will be serving similar sentences with those, convicted after trial, who imported into Hong Kong amounts of about 1 kilogram, but the one-third discount that we give for pleas has that result. This is neither the time nor the occasion to depart from the habitual one-third that we give in these circumstances, though it is worthy of note that when the figures become so large, the results are not always logical but in your case it works, obviously, to your advantage.
The sentence is 22 years.