HKSAR v. CHU CHIN FUNG

HCCC 44/2016

IN THE HIGH COURT OF THE

HONG KONG SPECIAL ADMINISTRATIVE REGION

COURT OF FIRST INSTANCE

CRIMINAL CASE NO 44 OF 2016

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Transcript of the Audio Recording
of the Sentence in the above Case

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COURT: I don’t propose to keep you in suspense. You are going to prison for 6 years.

By your pleas of guilty, you accept that your claim to the police that the cocaine found on you was for your own use was untrue, as was your claim that you did not know about the cocaine that the police say they found in your car. There is no direct evidence of where you were in the distribution chain. But if the intelligence that the police had on you is anything to go by, you were selling the cocaine at street level to end-users. You therefore have to be sentenced on the basis that you are a relatively low-level dealer in cocaine.

You will have been told that the Court of Appeal has laid down guidelines for the appropriate sentence for people who traffic in cocaine. The guidelines are based on the amount of cocaine involved, although the court does not look at the weight of the cocaine as a whole. It focuses on the narcotic content of the cocaine. The weight of the narcotic content of the cocaine in your case was 94 grammes. I acknowledge that had you been arrested a week

earlier or a week later, the amount of cocaine you would then have had to sell might have been very different. It was therefore a matter of chance that on this particular occasion, you happened to have this quantity of cocaine to sell. But what you had on you and in your car at the time of your arrest 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 50 and 200 grammes of cocaine, after pleading not guilty, is from 8 to 12 years’ imprisonment. You are the classic small-time dealer in cocaine contemplated by the guidelines, and there is no reason for departing from the guidelines in your case.

However, you have previous convictions for drug offences, three of which were for convictions for trafficking: one when you were 21 for which were sentenced to 15 months’ imprisonment, and two when you were 28 for which you were sentenced to a total of 18 months’ imprisonment. Indeed, you have twice been detained in a drug addiction treatment centre for possessing dangerous drugs. Although you cannot be punished again for those offences, they make what you did this time that much more serious.

I take into account that you have been at a low ebb since your father’s death while you were on remand, and that with the help of your girlfriend and your new-found Christian beliefs, you intend to turn your life around. I am a little sceptical about that because one has heard defendants in your position say similar things often before. But I am prepared to assume that what you have said is true, and in the light of everything I know about you, including your previous convictions as well as the nature of your trafficking on this occasion and the amount of cocaine you had with you to sell, I propose to take 9 years’ imprisonment as my starting point.

You are entitled to have your sentence reduced by one-third because of your pleas of guilty, even though those pleas of guilty were tendered today on the first day of your trial. That is because the date for your trial had already been fixed by 2 September when the Court of Appeal created a new regime for giving credit for pleas of guilty. That means that the sentence which I pass on each of the two counts of trafficking in the indictment to which you have pleaded guilty, Count 1 relating to the cocaine found on you and Count 2 relating to the cocaine found in your car, is 6 years’ imprisonment, to be served concurrently with each other, making 6 years’ imprisonment in all.