“Where the operation is on the most serious and commercial scale, involving a quantity of drugs significantly higher than category 1, sentences of 20 years and above may be appropriate, depending on the role of the offender.”
“3. Before addressing these individual appeals, it is worth emphasising the general difficulties which face defendants who seek to appeal against their sentence in cases of this kind where a judge has sentenced many defendants for their various parts in a large conspiracy to supply drugs. In such a case the judge will usually have had charge of the case over many months and at a series of hearings, will have read or heard the prosecution evidence as it relates to all the defendants and he may have conducted trials or Newton hearings in relation to some of them. It is self-evident that in those circumstances the sentencing judge is uniquely well placed to consider the different roles of the various conspirators and the nature and extent of each person’s involvement. The judge is thus also uniquely well placed to calibrate the sentences imposed so as to achieve parity among the defendants and reflect their relative levels of responsibility. 4. The Court of Appeal does not have those advantages. So unless it can be shown that in sentencing a particular defendant the judge did so on a factual basis which is obviously mistaken, or that the judge made an error of principle, or that in assessing the weight which should or should not be given to one or more relevant factors the judge formed a view which no reasonable judge, acting reasonably, could have formed, the Court of Appeal is most unlikely to think it right to interfere with the judge’s assessment of the appropriate sentence. Arguments that the judge misappraised the level of a defendant’s role in the conspiracy or imposed a sentence which is unfair in comparison with the sentences imposed on other defendants will seldom have any realistic prospect of success.”