CRIMINAL CASE NO. 122 OF 2010
COURT: The facts are straightforward. You were stopped in the street by a police officer in December last year. The drugs, as well as some equipment often used in connection with trafficking in drugs, were found in your possession, as were the two identity cards belonging to other people.
You know the misery that your use of drugs has brought yours. You have plainly been drug dependent for a long period of time, looking at your record. It seems that you have finally come to realise the misery it has caused your family as well. Yet notwithstanding that, you were very happy to traffic drugs and bring that misery to other people in our community.
It is in an attempt to minimise that occurrence that the courts impose stringent sentences for these offences.
Your counsel has rightly pointed out the bands that the major quantities of the drugs, the “Ice” and the ketamine, fall into in terms of sentencing. Where there is a mixture of drugs like this, it is not the appropriate course to take a starting point for each one and add them up. If that were the procedure, in this case you would be looking at in excess of 11 years in terms of a starting point.
As it is, the appropriate course is to take a starting point for the largest quantity of the drugs - that is “Ice”, and for the quantity you have, I would take 7 years 9 months starting - then to make an upward adjustment for the fact of the presence of the additional drugs.
It seems to me, following that system, that the overall starting point after trial should be one of 8 years and 6 months.
You are entitled to a third discount from that as a result of your plea. That reduces the sentence to 5 years and 8 months.
The state of your criminal record certainly does not entitle you to any further discount, but I do not think it has quite reached the stage where the sentence should be enhanced because of your background.
So on Count 1, you are to serve a period of 5 years and 8 months imprisonment.
We have no further information as to why you were in possession of the two identity cards belonging to other people. On that basis, it is straightforward possession of those cards for which you are to be sentenced. The accepted sentence for offences involving possession of other persons’ identity cards after a plea of guilty is one of 12 months’ imprisonment. That is the sentence I impose on Count 2.
They are separate and distinct offences and unrelated. The second sentence is to be served consecutively to the first sentence.
That means an aggregate sentence of 6 years and 8 months.
Taking into account the principle of totality, I think that is the appropriate sentence overall.