COURT: I don’t propose to keep you in suspense. You are going to prison for 10 years and 10 months. When I’ve left court, your lawyers will explain to you when you are likely to be released, bearing in mind the rules we have about remission of sentence, and the length of time you’ve been in custody.
The presence in the car you were driving of a bundle of empty resealable plastic bags and a pair of electronic scales tell their own story. They are the paraphernalia associated with drug trafficking. They could show that your role in the operation by which hard drugs were to get onto the market was something more than a mere delivery man taking them to the next stage in the distribution chain by which they were eventually to reach the ultimate consumer.
They could show that you were at least engaged in packaging them into suitable quantities to enable them to be sold on the street. But there is no evidence from which the court could infer that that was indeed your role as their presence in the car you were driving with the ice and the heroin which had already been packaged was just as consistent with you being no more than a courier.
The presence of a sizable amount of cash on you at the time does not enable me to conclude that you were anything more than that.
You will have been told that the Court of Appeal has laid down guidelines for the appropriate sentence for people who traffic in drugs. As you know from your previous brushes with the law, the guidelines are based on the weight of the narcotic content of the drugs involved.
The weight of the narcotic content of the ice found in your car was 260.7 grammes, and the weight of the narcotic content of the heroin was 220 grammes. I acknowledge that had you been arrested a week earlier or a week later, the quantity of the ice and heroin you would then have had may have been less.
It was therefore a matter of chance that on the day of your arrest there happened to be this amount of ice and heroin in the car you were driving. But the amount you had with you that day is the only basis on which the court can sentence you.
The guidelines say that the appropriate range for someone who is convicted of trafficking in between 70 and 300 grammes of ice is 11 to 15 years’ imprisonment, and the appropriate range for someone who is convicted of trafficking in between 200 and 500 grammes of heroin is 12 to 16 years’ imprisonment.
Those are the appropriate ranges for someone who has been convicted after pleading not guilty. The guidelines were set for defendants who were involved in trafficking at the lowest level of culpability, namely, as a courier or storekeeper, such as yourself.
So you are looking at a notional starting point for sentence of about 14 years’ and 4 months’ imprisonment for the ice, and a notional starting point for sentence of about 12 years’ and 3 months’ imprisonment for the heroin.
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 longer sentence which would have been passed for the drugs you were trafficking in if you had to be sentenced just for that - in this case the ice - and then to take into account the fact that you were trafficking in heroin as well.
I bear in mind 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.
In the light of all of these factors, I propose to take as my overall starting point a term of 2 years in excess of the notional starting point for the ice. That comes to an overall starting point of 16 years’ and 4 months’ imprisonment.
In doing so, I have 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 where the offender has been convicted of trafficking in more than one drug is broadly correct.
I turn to such mitigation as you have. There is really only one thing to be said on your behalf, and that is that it was intimated on your behalf to the Magistracy that you would be pleading guilty, and that was before the date on which you actually pleaded guilty and were committed to the High Court for sentence. That entitles you to have your sentence discounted by one-third.
You have in the past served long sentences for trafficking in dangerous drugs, though your record also suggests that you got into trafficking in dangerous drugs as a result of your own addiction. The courts have said that things like that count for little when it comes to sentencing drug traffickers, and your counsel has expressly disavowed your addiction as mitigation. It follows that the overall starting point in your case should only be reduced to 10 years’ and 10 months’ imprisonment.
Standing back and looking at that sentence as a whole in the light of the guidelines which I must of course respect, its totality represents, I think, a fair, just and balanced sentence in the circumstances of the case and your plea of guilty.