Posted on: Tuesday, May 17, 2005
Lawyer gets six years for narcotics
By Ken Kobayashi
Advertiser Courts Writer
A lawyer believed to be the first in Hawai'i to be convicted of participating in plans to smuggle drugs into a state correctional facility was sentenced yesterday to six years in federal prison.
Stephen Leong, 42, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Alan Kay on charges that included purchasing two ounces of crystal methamphetamine from an undercover police officer at a parking lot in front of the Aloha Tower Marketplace in April 2003.
Leong could have gotten a much longer term, but Kay went along with the defense argument that Leong hadn't been inclined to purchase that amount of ice when he bought the drug in a "sting" operation.
Assistant U.S. Attorney William Shipley said he was disappointed by the judge's finding and asked that Kay sentence Leong to a 6 1/2-year prison term, the maximum under federal sentencing guidelines.
Leong would have faced a minimum of 155 months in prison under the guidelines without the judge's finding.
Leong's lawyer, Art Ross, described his client as a lawyer who didn't make a lot of money but tried to help people in civil-rights cases. Ross asked for a sentence closer to the lower end of the 53 months to 6 1/2 years his client faced under the guidelines. Leong told the judge the government exploited his lack of knowledge about the drug culture to "set me up" in buying the drugs. He asked for a term of 10 to 16 months.
But Kay said he was imposing the six-year term in part because of the seriousness of the offenses.
Leong was found guilty by a federal jury last year. The sting was set up after the wife of a Halawa prison inmate gave gram-amounts of ice to Leong earlier in 2003, according to her trial testimony.
In April, the Hawai'i Supreme Court disbarred Leong from the practice of law for ethical violations that included misappropriating clients' funds and failing to deposit clients' funds into his trust account.
Reach Ken Kobayashi at kkobayashi@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8030.
