CRIMINAL CASE NO. 205 OF 2010
When you were intercepted in Yen Chow Street in Sham Shui Po and the drugs were found, you said that you were out of work and so you had agreed to deliver the drugs for a meal and that you were to take them to a McDonald’s restaurant in Yen Chow Street and you would be paid $500 as a reward.
And so you have been charged with trafficking in those dangerous drugs. You pleaded guilty in the Magistrates’ Court and you have admitted the facts that are relevant and you have been committed here to the Court of First Instance for sentence.
You are man of 40 years of age, a delivery worker, I am told by Mr Leung on your behalf, and a man with quite a long history of involvement in dangerous drugs. You have been to DATC before and as recently as 2008, you were sent to DATC.
I know, from what Mr Leung has told me, that you have been informed that sentencing for trafficking in dangerous drugs is based upon guidelines laid down by the Court of Appeal for different types of drugs with the objective that drug traffickers are sentenced on more or less the same basis for each case. I say ‘more or less’ because sentencing is not an arithmetical exercise, it is not a question of simply working matters out on a chart. It is a question of judgment as to what is the appropriate sentence and that is the judgment that I must now make.
But you have been told, I know, that the guidelines for methamphetamine hydrochloride laid down by the Court of Appeal, so far as they relate to your case, refer to a wide bracket of 10 to 70 grammes of methamphetamine hydrochloride for which a sentence of 7 to 10 years’ imprisonment is prescribed, before any discount for mitigation. Your case falls to the lower end of that bracket, even though it is not quite at the bottom end of it, with 28.54 grammes of “Ice” being the relevant figure.
There are no aggravating features in your case, but there is mitigation. The mitigation, as you know, is primarily your plea of guilty. It is that plea of guilty that gets you the discount of one-third from the starting point. That does not mean that the other aspects of your mitigation, your family circumstances and so forth, are ignored, but the plea of guilty is the most important aspect.
In my judgment, in the circumstances of your case, it is appropriate to take a starting point of 7 years’ imprisonment and I intend to reduce that by one-third to 4 years and 8 months’ imprisonment. That, therefore, is the term of imprisonment that I impose upon you for this offence of trafficking.