HKSAR v. CHEUNG HOI SANG

HCCC 363/2015

IN THE HIGH COURT OF THE

HONG KONG SPECIAL ADMINISTRATIVE REGION

COURT OF FIRST INSTANCE

CRIMINAL CASE NO 363 OF 2015

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

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COURT: I do not propose to keep you suspense. You are going to prison for 6 years.

You have to be sentenced on the basis that you are a relatively low-level dealer in hard drugs like ‘Ice’, ketamine and heroin to feed your own drug habit. You claimed to the police that you only sold drugs to your friends, but that is not a good reason for giving you a lighter sentence and, anyway, it depends what you mean by your “friends”. When low-level dealers refer to their friends, they usually mean that they only sell to people they know, and they do that to avoid being caught selling to an undercover police officer.

The prosecution does not dispute that the ketamine found on you at the time of your arrest was for your own use, but by your plea of guilty to Count 2 and your acceptance of paragraph 10 of the facts, you admit that you were intending to sell all the drugs found in your room.

You would have been told that the Court of Appeal has laid down guidelines for the appropriate sentence for people who traffic in drugs. The guidelines are based on the amount of the drugs involved, though the court does not look at the weight as a whole. It focuses on the narcotic content of the drugs. The weight of the narcotic content of the drugs in your case was 31 grammes of ‘Ice’, 16 grammes of ketamine and almost 5 grammes of heroin.

I acknowledge that had you been arrested a week earlier or a week later the quantities of the drugs you would then have had in your room to sell might have been very different. It was, therefore, a matter of chance that on this particular occasion you happened to have these quantities of drugs in your room to sell. But what you had in your room 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 10 and 70 grammes of ‘Ice’ is 7 to 10 years’ imprisonment. The appropriate range for someone who is convicted of trafficking in between 10 and 50 grammes of ketamine is 4 to 6 years’ imprisonment, and the appropriate range for someone who is convicted of trafficking in up to 10 grammes of heroin is 2 to 5 years’ imprisonment. These are the appropriate ranges for someone who has been convicted after pleading not guilty. It goes without saying that your offences are too serious for rehabilitation in a Drug Addiction Treatment Centre for a term of up to 12 months to be appropriate.

You are the classic small-time dealer in drugs contemplated by the guidelines, and there is no reason for departing from the guidelines in your case, though it would not be fair if I simply took the appropriate sentence for each of the drugs you were intending to sell and then aggregated them.

The fairer and more realistic approach is to take the longest sentence which would have been passed for the drugs in which you were caught trafficking if you had to be sentenced for them separately, in this case the ‘Ice’, and then to take into account the fact that you were caught trafficking, albeit in less significant quantities in other drugs. I bear in mind that 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 the nature of your trafficking, the quantity and variety of the drugs you had in your room to sell, the fact that the quantity of ‘Ice’ you had in your room to sell was towards the lower end of the appropriate range, and the fact that this is not the first time that you are having to go to prison for your involvement with drugs, I propose to take 9 years’ imprisonment as my starting point on Count 2, and to pass a concurrent sentence of imprisonment on Count 1.

You are entitled to have your sentence reduced by one-third because of your pleas of guilty, even though it was only a few days ago that you said that you were going to plead guilty. That means that the sentence which I pass on Count 2 in the amended indictment, that of trafficking in dangerous drugs, is 6 years’ imprisonment, and on Count 1 for being in possession of the ketamine found on you at the time of your arrest, I sentence you to 8 months’ imprisonment, to be served concurrently with the sentence of 6 years’ imprisonment on Count 2, making 6 years’ imprisonment in all.