Youth’s punishment for smuggling upped to 2 years

SINGAPORE — A High Court judge has increased a young cigarette smuggler’s jail sentence from 15 months to 24 months following an appeal from prosecutors, ruling that it is important to apply the principle of sentencing parity across accomplices to maintain public confidence in the integrity of the administration of justice.

The case in question involved Pang Shuo, who was aged 19 when he was sentenced to 15 months’ jail for unloading 480kg of duty unpaid cigarettes. In contrast, his 20-year-old accomplice Zhi Dian was sentenced to 24 months’ jail.

In his grounds of decision released on Thursday, Justice Chan Seng Onn found that the district judge in Pang’s case had been “overly lenient”, going by the sentencing benchmark laid down by Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon in April 2014.

The factors to be considered were the amount of duty evaded, the quantity of goods involved, whether the offender was a repeat offender, whether he was acting on his own or was involved in a syndicated operation, and his role in the crime.

While a discount in the sentence ought to be given to young first-time offenders, Justice Chan found no reason for the extent of the disparity in this case on July 28 last year.

In explaining how he arrived at the decision to increase Pang’s jail term to 24 months, the judge also issued guidelines for the discount that may be applied to young offenders. For the same offence, an offender aged 20 could be considered for a 5 per cent discount to the benchmark sentence.

Those aged 19 could get a 15 per cent discount, and so on, until 45 per cent for offenders aged 16.

Going by this framework, Pang got a 46 per cent discount from the benchmark sentence, when he should have qualified for just 15 per cent, Justice Chan said.

In urging for Pang’s sentence to be enhanced, prosecutors had also pointed out that Pang was slightly more culpable than Zhi, as he was involved in the collection, delivery and unloading of the contraband cigarettes. Zhi, on the other hand, had only unloaded the goods.

But Justice Chan noted the culpability of two “low-level” offenders as paid workers in a syndicate could be minor, regardless of whether one was involved in importing at the start of the illicit supply chain or in unloading at the end.

“If one considers the various offending physical acts needed to carry out a smuggling operation, it is perhaps fortuitous that an offender, a mere paid worker within the criminal smuggling enterprise hypothetically involved in the whole chain at every step, was caught at one step, and not another,” he said. “The level of culpability inherent in the different physical acts carried out by a paid worker in the smuggling chain can be regarded as largely similar.

“I cannot see any real or substantive distinction in the worker’s culpability for these various individual physical acts.”

Justice Chan added that generally, the quantity of cigarettes smuggled was the most pertinent factor since this had direct links with the loss of revenue to the Government and the consumption of harmful goods.

He said the Government’s loss of revenue through cigarette smuggling easily runs into tens of millions of dollars and smuggling activities undermine the integrity of Singapore’s trading system as well as efforts to reduce the consumption of harmful goods.

Justice Chan noted that between 2013 and 2015, about three million packets of duty unpaid cigarettes were seized each year, a figure that is double that of 2012. And while the number of persons prosecuted for cigarette offences fell from 2010 to a low in 2013, there has been “an unfortunate slight rebound” over the past two years.