In January 2016, Mexican authorities arrested Gastelum Avila and Guzman Loera together in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, Mexico, as they attempted to flee arrest. Doug Beck Named New Director of the Defense Innovation Unit, Smiths Detection Checkpoint CT Screening System Receives DHS SAFETY Act Designation, OIG Tells FEMA to Increase Oversight to Prevent Misuse of Humanitarian Relief Funds, GDIT Appoints Former FBI Official Ralph Tursi as Senior Director for Law Enforcement Business, Florida Man Pleads Guilty to Unlawfully Making Destructive Device with Pipe, Tannerite, and Pyrotechnic Powder, HSI Kansas City Hosts First Women in Leadership Symposium, ICE Announces First-Ever Alternatives to Detention Privacy Impact Assessment. 90-95(h). Although the supplementary sentencing bands for cocaine and heroin are a response to concerns about the harshness of the sentence range, the cardinal proportion for sentencing dangerous drugs traffickers in Hong Kong is deemed necessary to deter this act, where the Court considers drug trafficking as a world-wide problem.Footnote 70 The Court commented on the apparent deterrent effect in Hong Kong in HKSAR v Kilima Abubakar Abbas: [] having had to consider in the past few months the trends and statistics for the seizures, arrests and convictions in respect of a wide spectrum of dangerous drugs in Hong Kong since January 2015, is that rather than being swamped by a problem which is out of control, as other countries seem to have been, the problem in Hong Kong is being steadily contained, if not, in certain respects, reduced.

Ketamine Starting Sentence Points for Category 1-4 Drug Weights for each Offender Role Category (England and Wales). ;J$'Y(+}~-V)/06Wtjb e!k^rY)75\9e~6zqnO2_0+HU9Y- This implies that an increase in the drug weight relates to a proportional increase in the sentence given to the defendant. Figure 2. For England and Wales, their sentencing guidelines account for an offender's role, and there are curves for each of the three role types (leading, significant, and lesser).Footnote 10 While England and Wales consider offender culpability within their sentencing guidelines, in Hong Kong, such considerations are based on judicial discretion. In Hong Kong, sentencing guidelines, referred to as drug tariffs, are derived from the case law of the Court of Appeal. To ascertain the arithmetic starting point, the drug weight and sentence thresholds must be used.

This research was wholly supported by a Direct Grant for Research (Project Code 4059045) from the Faculty of Law, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. A federal district court judge will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. View all Google Scholar citations WebFederal Drug Offense Sentencing Guidelines Overview: 21 U.S.C. 51 Sentencing Council, Drug Offenses, Response to Consultation, (Sentencing Council, 2012) accessed 8 Jan 2022. Using these three models as baseline comparisons helps to ascertain whether the guidelines represent a logarithmic, proportional, or exponential sentencing mechanism for drug trafficking.

"The charges in this case reflect the Justice Department's commitment to dismantling drug trafficking organizations that sow violence and fear in our communities. This Court [does] not have evidence to show that the applicant was the main instigator of the drug trafficking or was a repeat offender. The lower threshold of Hong Kong's lowest category drug weight (of over 1 gram to 10 grams) is closer to the upper threshold of England and Wales lowest category drug weight. Within the entire framework of England and Wales guidelines, the largest difference between the slopes is 0.234 months of sentence per gram of trafficked drug. In Hong Kong, 8 grams of cocaine would equate to 52.8 months. This means that Hong Kong's most punitive sentencing guidelines for cocaine and heroin and its most lenient differs by 3.596 months of sentence per gram of trafficked drug.



According to the court in HKSAR v Thattephin Tanyamon. How can certain offences be compared to others on the basis of their seriousness? The random nature of these inconsistencies underscores the arbitrary nature of the guideline thresholds. Contrary to initial assumptions that the more offensive the offender role, the steeper the slope, the lesser category has a steeper slope than the significant role.

Sentencing Commission is an independent agency in the judicial branch that was created as part of the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984. 27 Osler, Mark, Indirect harms and proportionality: The upside-down world of federal sentencing (2004) 74 Mississippi Law Journal 1Google Scholar. This handout presents an overview of the Commission's Report to the Congress: Career Offender Sentencing Enhancements. 39 HKSAR v Kilima Abubakar Abbas [2018] 5 HKLRD 88, [2018] HKCA 602 para 71. This supports the existing guidelines in Lau Tak Ming.Footnote 69 Till this day, these guidelines still stand as the drug tariffs for cocaine and heroin.
The court in Abdallah provided supplementary guidelines for weights of cocaine and heroin above 600 grams. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors. Figure 3. Given that the weight of the additional trafficked drug is the same in both scenarios, the slope indicates that jurisdiction B's guidelines are more lenient in regard to drug X. Intrajurisdiction comparisons can also be conducted using slopes of the guidelines linear functions to ascertain the types of drugs that are viewed as more harmful than others. How Indonesia can lead a new global approach to treating drug traffickers as human trafficked victims (2018) 8 Asian Journal of International Law 166. This starting sentence is based on the drug type and drug weight, and is ascertained before any adjustments based on aggravating or mitigating factors are made. Ideally, an effective criminal justice system is one that doles out fair punishments that convey the message of society's reprobation over an act, redresses the harm inflicted by an offence, and deters offenders and the general public from committing such an illicit act in future.Footnote 11 The results of this analysis reveal that the scale used to measure the quantity of drugs is disproportionate as penalties for smaller quantities are more stringent than larger quantities. } At first glance, these ranges seem to make intuitive sense based on observed practices by street dealers and wholesale traffickers, and reflect the principle of proportionalityFootnote 2 the more drugs an offender traffics, the longer the imprisonment sentence. He is also charged with knowingly and intentionally using, carrying, brandishing, and discharging a firearm, including a destructive device, during and in relation to a drug trafficking crime. Sentencing guidelines structured this way would be proportional to the seriousness of the offence in question, demonstrating that trafficking greater quantities of drugs is considered as more serious. Sentence Starting Point for Ketamine/Ecstasy in Months (Hong Kong). The only difference between the different offender roles is the minimum starting point weight.

f`(H[U]$A] z&F G !K Forfeiture or suspension of liquor licence, 24. However, upon closer scrutiny, smaller weights are associated with sentences that increase at a higher rate than higher weight ranges.

In December 2018, a grand jury returned an indictment against Gastelum Avila. Trafficking and use of cocaine has a close connection with violent crime.

The overall harshness of the scale (a minimum of 2 to 5 years for 1050 grams of narcotics in the first band to a maximum of 1820 years for 400600 grams of narcotics) was stated to strongly deter the international trade in drugs.Footnote 65, The absolute maximum sentence provided for drug trafficking was life for weights above 600 grams, which was considered a substantial weight. Each year, the Commission reviews and refines these policies in light of congressional action, decisions from courts of appeals, sentencing-related research, and input from the criminal justice community. Web*The minimum sentence for a violation after two or more prior convictions for a felony drug offense have become final is a mandatory term of life imprisonment without release and a The slope is calculated using the following equation (Equation 2): From the equation above, the slope can be calculated by dividing the difference between the minimum and maximum sentence for each categorical range by the upper and lower bounds of the category's drug weight. Harsh sentences are considered necessary to serve as deterrence to drug trafficking.Footnote 3 The rationale behind this reasoning is the harmful effect of drug addiction suffered by drug users and the detrimental impact of drugs on the social fabric of the community.Footnote 4 This was a central issue concerning drug-related offences in the latter half of the 20th century.Footnote 5 The United Nations directed states to address the manufacturing, supply, and non-medical use of drugs.Footnote 6 States, including Britain, convened at the United States behest to establish (stricter) regulations on the humanitarian grounds for curbing drug abuse. The slopes of the guidelines are combined in the tables based on the drug type for intra- and interjurisdictional comparison.

While England and Wales sentencing guidelines and judgements, provide guidelines for determining culpability, the delineation between offender roles is still debatable and can lead to sentencing challenges. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors. The slope of each linear function highlights the added sentence for an additional gram of drugs for each sentence category. Instead, a person convicted of drug trafficking Disqualification from driving general power, 10. In other words, each additional gram of trafficked drug, regardless of whether it is a Class A or Class B drug, attracts the same penalty. Ketamine is a Class B drug, and its corresponding sentence starting point is as follows: Table 2. Under Iowa law, many people are currently serving a Class C felony sentence under Iowa Code section 124.401 (1) (c) for offenses such as: drug possession with

0 hasContentIssue true, Proportionality and Deterrence in Drug Trafficking Sentencing, This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (, Copyright The Author(s), 2022. Total loading time: 0 This arrest operation is part of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF) program. A Mexican national made his initial appearance in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia yesterday to face international drug trafficking and firearms charges. Although both slopes plateau from approximately 1000 grams onwards, the steepness of the curve from 150 grams to 1000 grams is significantly more pronounced for Hong Kong's linear function.

24 Reuter, Peter & Stevens, Alex, Assessing UK drug policy from a crime-control perspective (2008) 8 Criminology and Criminal Justice 461CrossRefGoogle Scholar. One of the leading cases on sentencing guidelines is R v Lau Tak Ming and Ors, where the Court updated the guidelines to reflect the drug situation in Hong Kong in the early 1990s.

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This implies that the scale used to measure the quantity of drugs is disproportionate, penalising smaller quantities more harshly than larger quantities.

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