CRIMINAL CASE NO. 83 OF 2010
COURT: The facts in your case to which you have pleaded guilty could hardly be more simple. On 9 October last year, you were driving a car which got stuck in traffic. The police intercepted you and on the floor of the passenger side of the vehicle of the car that you were driving was found the drugs. You accepted that you were delivering them, in return for a small reward, for somebody else. You said that you were doing so to earn some money because you had been unemployed for two months.
The drug in question turned out to be 5.3 kilograms of ketamine. That is, to my knowledge, the largest quantity of ketamine to come before the Court of First Instance for sentence since the guidelines in Hii Siew Cheng were considered by the Court of Appeal. In so far as ketamine is concerned, those guidelines only go up to 1 kilogram and that suggests, from 1 kilogram, a sentence of 14 years upwards. You had over five times that quantity.
I am aware of two other decisions at this level: a sentence imposed on 13 January in case number 382/2009 which involved 2½ kilograms where a starting point of 17½ years was adopted, and a sentence on 28 April this year in case number 76/2010 where a quantity of 3.8 kilograms attracted a starting point of 18 years.
Dealing with trafficking in very large quantities of heroin - and of course heroin is a very different substance to ketamine - the Court of Appeal in Abbas indicated that, for quantities between 4 and 15 kilograms, 26 to 30 years’ imprisonment would be appropriate.
In the course of Abbas, the Court of Appeal reviewed a number of sentences imposed for quantities of around 5 kilograms of heroin. That review is to be found at paragraph 19 of the judgment and shows that for that type of quantity, 24 or 25 years’ imprisonment was imposed. It must be that the Court of Appeal took the view that those sentences were on the low side because, for 4 kilograms, it suggested a minimum of 26 years.
You are not being sentenced for heroin, you are being sentenced for ketamine, but I have referred to the heroin guidelines just to get some sort of feel for the appropriate starting point in your case. It seems to me that, in the circumstances and bearing in mind the sentences imposed in the substantial ketamine trafficking cases to which I have earlier referred, the appropriate starting point here is 20 years’ imprisonment.
As your counsel realistically has suggested, the only valuable mitigation available to you is your plea of guilty. That entitles you to a one-third discount. The result of that is that you are to go to gaol for 13 years and 4 months.