CRIMINAL CASE NO. 298 OF 2012
COURT: On 6 February this year, you were intercepted when entering Hong Kong through the airport. Nothing illegal was found in your baggage but it
was subsequently revealed that you were carrying objects internally. It turns out that you had swallowed a number of pellets, according to you, whilst you were in Kuala Lumpur and you intended to transit Hong Kong to deliver the contents of those pellets to someone in the mainland.
You excreted a total of 68 pellets the contents of which were subsequently analysed and found to contain 639.15 grammes of heroin hydrochloride. You acknowledged when you pleaded guilty that the value of those drugs was a little under a million Hong Kong dollars.
I am told that you carried these drugs because you were tempted by the offer of some US$4,500 to do so and that your poverty and the poverty of your family and the necessity for you to support your family tempted you to accept that offer. Be that as it may, you have travelled certainly quite extensively into and out of Hong Kong on a number of previous occasions and you would have been well aware of the prohibition against smuggling drugs.
It may be, from your point of view, that you were mildly fortunate to be caught in Hong Kong, where you will face a substantial period of imprisonment, rather than in many of the other jurisdictions in this area. The fact that you were offered $4,500 for doing this would have made it blindingly clear to you that there was a high risk involved.
You entered your plea of guilty at the earliest opportunity and that entitles you to a one-third discount from a starting point after trial. Deserving of understanding as your personal circumstances and family background may well be, it is now well established that these type of matters do not avail you for mitigation.
The quantity that you imported into Hong Kong falls just within the new guidelines laid down by the Court of Appeal in Abdallah. The first bracket provides for a period of between 20 and 23 years’ imprisonment for a quantity between 600 and 1,200 grammes. I will take 20 years as the starting point. The amount, over 600, that you were carrying was fairly small.
That decision also recognises as an aggravating feature the importation of drugs into Hong Kong. It suggests an enhancement, where the quantity involved exceeds 1 kilogram, of not less than 2 years. In these circumstances, I will enhance the starting point by 1 year. It makes a total of 21 years.
Reducing that by the one-third allowance for your plea of guilty results in the fact that you will go to prison for 14 years.