CRIMINAL CASE NO. 454 OF 2011
COURT: The defendant was originally tried in the High Court on the present indictment between 15 and 19 July 2010. At that trial he was convicted of trafficking and sentenced to 8 years’ imprisonment.
His appeal against that conviction was allowed by the Court of Appeal on 14 December 2011. In allowing the appeal, the court ordered a retrial on the same indictment, which retrial falls before me today. However, at a pre‑trial review on 18 June of this year, counsel for the defendant, Mr Chan, who appears before me today, indicated that his client would be pleading guilty to the charge, as he has now done.
The facts are very simple. The defendant was stopped and searched in the street by police officers just before 1 o’clock in the morning on 29 June 2009. The dangerous drugs the subject matter of this indictment were found in his right front trouser pocket. Those drugs were found to be 20.59 grammes of a crystalline solid containing 20.34 grammes of methamphetamine hydrochloride, with a street value of $14,062.
The operative narcotic amount for sentencing purposes is therefore 20.34 grammes of methamphetamine hydrochloride, commonly known as “Ice”. Such a quantity places the defendant at the lower end of the 7 to 10 year imprisonment bracket set out in the case of R v Ching Kwok Hung [1991] 2 HKLR 125.
In my judgment, the appropriate starting point in this particular case is one of 7½ years’ imprisonment. I appreciate that his previous sentence was 8 years after trial, but I am not bound by the sentence of that court. My own view, applying a strictly mathematical approach to the quantity of 20.34 grammes of narcotic under the guidelines, is that the starting point should be 7½ years’ imprisonment.
As Mr Chan, for the defence, recognises, this is not a timely plea at the first available opportunity. He is not therefore entitled to a full one-third discount for his plea, although he is entitled to a significant reduction, bearing in mind the time and expense that he would have saved by pleading now without the necessity of embarking upon a second trial. I assess that discount at approximately 25 per cent.
In all the circumstances, the defendant will go to prison for 5 years and 8 months.