COURT: I have to sentence you for trafficking in dangerous drugs. The drug in question was cocaine and you had carried 0.64 of a kilogramme from Bogota, via Paris, to our international airport where you were stopped. The drugs were concealed in a secret compartment in your luggage.
You will have been told that sentencing in these courts proceeds upon guidelines which are based on the nature and quantity of the drug. For cocaine, you fall into a guideline that runs from 600 grammes to 1,200 grammes, attracting a starting point after trial of 20 to 23 years’ imprisonment. Thus your 640 grammes falls at the bottom end of that bracket and I will go to the bottom end and look at 20 years.
It is also our practice here to regard the fact that you carried this cocaine across international boundaries as an aggravating factor which, for this amount, would attract a further 1 year imprisonment.
You know that you earn a one-third discount for your plea of guilty. The sentence would thus be one of 14 years’ imprisonment.
However, I am presented with a very nice mitigation from your counsel, Mr Surman, who tells me a story which I have heard often before in other cases concerning couriers carrying cocaine from Colombia and the story is this, that you lost your job through no fault of your own; you started your own butchery business; you got into debt and the rancher who had given you the credit then wanted either his money or a favour, and the favour was to carry these drugs to Hong Kong; that you did not want to; that indeed there was one aborted mission where an air ticket was wasted and the offer to wipe out the debt paled into insignificance in the face of threats made to you and your family, especially your two daughters.
The way Mr Surman presented it was attractive and had the ring of truth. But on the other hand, I suspect that is as much due to his qualities as an advocate as to the real facts of the case, because I do not really know with anything approaching certainty, even on the balance of probabilities, I do not know what the real position was or is.
I bear in mind that you are a man who has pleaded guilty and in those circumstances, certainly, this court tries to honour the mitigation presented following a plea of guilty if it can; if it is reasonable, if it is established, in effect, on a balance of probability.
I take the point made by Mr Surman that the background to the culture where you come from is one where you will have come across people who have lost their life through not paying debts, where someone in your position may see recourse to the authorities there as being of no value. Cases like this do pose a problem.
Doing the best I can - and I am conscious it may be inadequate - I shall seek to reflect the mitigation by giving it some weight and therefore some discount. But because of the problem this sort of mitigation poses for courts like this, the amount of discount, the degree of weight has to be, as I say, limited.
Anyone else who looks at your case may want to know what was the judge’s finding, what did he think about the mitigation, and the answer is I simply do not know. And if asked whether it is established on the balance of probability, my answer is no. Though on the other hand, that does not mean I have to ignore the point completely.
It is right that I mention this, that part of the mitigation advanced is that when you were arrested here, you were willing to take part in a controlled delivery, and Mr Surman puts it on the basis that you were angry at being exploited by a named man and did not want this to happen to anyone else.
That tells me something about the nature of the claimed original threats to your daughters for if your desire to stop Mr Moreno’s activities is true, then the nature of that threat to your daughters was overcome by it. If it was truly an imminent and wicked threat which you truly believed might have been carried out, I have my doubts as to whether you would have offered that controlled delivery. But that, on the other hand, is not to say that a threat falling short of that quality was something that just could be ignored.
What I shall do is this. In looking at the notional sentence I had worked out earlier, I shall ignore the international part of it and I shall say that the effect of the mitigation I have heard, in effect, cancels out that aggravation because whatever happened back in Colombia played a part in making you do something you did not actually want to do.
So that would leave it at 20 years. A third of that would give a sentence of 13 years and 4 months. I will give that limited weight I mentioned earlier effect by rounding that down to 13 years.
The effect of that, I suspect you may think, is not very great; it is 13 years instead of 14 years. But given the public duty I have to do, the nature of your case, the number of similar cases like this and the fact that one must not lose sight that, amongst our neighbours, you would have faced the death penalty if stopped there, the mitigation, attractively though it was put, can only have that limited effect. The sentence I thus pass is one of 13 years’ imprisonment.
In effect, I believe it probably comes to this, that the gravity of trafficking drugs like this and the number of similar cases that come before the court mean that those factors personal to a defendant and why he committed the crime, which may have greater weight when considering other sorts of crime, have to be put behind the court’s public duty when it comes to cases like this; it takes second place and that is why the discount is limited.