HKSAR v. CHOI KANG SHUN

HCCC 412/2016

IN THE HIGH COURT OF THE

HONG KONG SPECIAL ADMINISTRATIVE REGION

COURT OF FIRST INSTANCE

CRIMINAL CASE NO 412 OF 2016

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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 in suspense. You are going to prison for 7½ years.

The jury saw through your claim that you went to the Shek Li Estate on that evening just to pick up a fare. You went there to deliver ketamine to Ng Wing-lung. There is no direct evidence of where you were in the distribution chain, but what you were doing just before your arrest in delivering the ketamine to Ng, coupled with the absence of any drugs or drug paraphernalia in your flat following your arrest, suggests that you were operating at the lower end of the distribution chain, acting as a courier delivering drugs from someone further up the chain to someone closer to the end users. That is the basis on which I propose to sentence you.

You will have been told that the Court of Appeal has laid down guidelines for the appropriate sentence for people who traffic in ketamine. The guidelines are based on the amount of ketamine involved. In your case, that was 193 grammes. I do not know whether this was the first time that you had been given ketamine to deliver to someone else, or any other drug for that matter. It would have been particularly bad luck if you had been arrested on the first occasion when this happened. If you had done this before, then had you been arrested a week earlier or a week later, the amount of ketamine or some other drug you might have had on you might have been very different. It would therefore have been a matter of chance that on this particular occasion, you happened to be delivering this quantity of ketamine. But what you were delivering on this occasion is the only basis on which the court can sentence you, and I cannot assume that you have done it before.

The guidelines say that the appropriate range for someone who is convicted of trafficking in ketamine with a narcotic content between 50 and 300 grammes, after pleading not guilty, is from 6 to 9 years’ imprisonment. There is no basis for departing from the guidelines in your case, and the only way in which I can reflect your low-level role in the distribution chain is within that range.

But you do have a number of previous convictions, including one for possession of heroin for the purposes of unlawful trafficking when you were a young man in your late teens, for which you were ordered to be detained in a training centre, and two for possession of drugs, one of which involved what you say amounted to a small quantity of cannabis when you were in your late 20s, for which you were detained in a Drug Addiction Treatment Centre, and the other which involved what you say was 1 gramme of ‘Ice’, much more recently, for which you were fined.

I am prepared to accept that you do not use drugs yourself any longer, but in the light of everything I know about you, including the nature of your trafficking, the amount of ketamine you were delivering, and the fact that this offence was committed while you were either on police bail or court bail, I propose to take 7½ years’ imprisonment as my starting point. I have not discerned any basis for reducing that term, and that means that the sentence which I pass on the one count of trafficking in the indictment of which you have been convicted is 7½ years’ imprisonment.