Date: Apr 30, 2026

Totality for Repeat Drug-Line Dealing: Separate “Tranches” Must Be Reflected by Uplift or Consecutivity

1) Introduction

In Hamid, R. v [2026] EWCA Crim 651, the Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) (Lady Justice May DBE, Mr Justice Linden, Ms Justice Obi DBE) determined an Attorney General’s Reference under section 36 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 concerning whether a Crown Court sentence was unduly lenient.

The offender was sentenced at Wood Green Crown Court for: (i) three offences of possession of Class A drugs with intent to supply arising from 2025 conduct; (ii) one offence of being concerned in the supply of Class A drugs arising from a separate period of dealing in 2022/23; and (iii) a criminal damage incident involving damage to a vehicle.

The key issue was totality: how the sentencing court should reflect multiple, temporally distinct episodes of similar “drug line” dealing (including dealing while on bail), alongside other offending, when imposing a single overall term—particularly where one episode pre-dated an earlier sentence but was dealt with later.

2) Summary of the Judgment

The Court granted leave and held the original overall sentence of 30 months’ imprisonment was unduly lenient.
The Court accepted the recorder’s categorisation of the 2025 drug offending and (in isolation) would not have interfered with the recorder’s assessment of mitigation.
However, the recorder failed adequately to reflect the separate 2022/23 “drug line” dealing and the criminal damage within the overall sentence.
The Court emphasised that the 2022/23 dealing was an active resumption after arrest, committed while on bail, and was not merely an overlap with earlier dealing.
The Court also identified an error of method: the guilty plea reduction was applied before (rather than after) mitigation, producing an over-reduction (though not decisive on its own).
Resentencing: the Court substituted a total sentence of five years’ imprisonment (with specified concurrent terms on the counts).

3) Analysis

A. Precedents Cited

Attorney General's Reference (R v Egan) [2022] EWCA Crim 1751

The Court relied on Attorney General's Reference (R v Egan) [2022] EWCA Crim 1751 to restate the high threshold for intervention under section 36:

Appellate restraint: the sentencing judge is usually best placed to weigh factors.
“Unduly lenient” means outside the range reasonably open to the sentencing court.
Leave is for exceptional cases, not borderline disagreements.
The jurisdiction targets gross error, but even then the Court retains a discretion whether to increase sentence.

This framing mattered because the Court differentiated (i) aspects of the recorder’s approach that were arguably “generous but permissible” from (ii) the totality failure that pushed the outcome beyond the permissible range.

Attorney-General's Reference (Azad) [2021] EWCA Crim 1846

Cited via Egan, Attorney-General's Reference (Azad) [2021] EWCA Crim 1846 reinforced the principle that section 36 is not an avenue for fine-tuning; it is engaged where the sentence is materially outside the proper range. The Court then applied that standard to the recorder’s handling of multiple offending episodes.

B. Legal Reasoning

(1) Totality where later sentencing captures earlier, distinct offending

Although the 2022/23 dealing post-dated the earlier “first” dealing period (which resulted in the March 2023 sentence), it was sentenced later, creating the classic “multiple sentencing events” problem. The Court treated the Totality Guideline (specifically, the drop-down guidance on “Sentencing for offences committed prior to other offences for which an offender has been sentenced”) as a useful guide when deciding what allowance—if any—should be made for an earlier sentence and how the overall criminality should be reflected.

Applying that guidance, the Court focused on:

Similarity of the offences (repeat operation of the same “line”);
Timing (not overlap: a renewed, separate tranche after arrest);
Intervening conduct and the offender’s position (reoffending while on bail);
Overall proportionality (what would have happened had everything been sentenced together).

The central evaluative conclusion was that the 2022/23 tranche was not a minor appendage to be “absorbed” by concurrency: it merited, in round terms, about two years’ additional custody (had it been dealt with properly at the time). That assessment drove the finding that the overall sentence of 30 months failed to reflect overall criminality.

(2) Concurrency vs consecutivity for distinct “tranches”

The Court accepted that a sentencing judge may choose a lead sentence and then structure other counts by concurrency or consecutivity. But it held that, on these facts, the 2022/23 dealing had to be reflected either:

by a consecutive component (at least in part), or
by a substantial uplift to the lead sentence for the 2025 offending.

Pure concurrency, coupled with an approach that effectively assumed the 2022/23 offending would have made no meaningful difference to the March 2023 sentence, was outside the reasonable range—especially where the tranche was committed on bail and ended only days before the March 2023 sentencing.

(3) Delay: when it does (and does not) mitigate

The defence relied on delay in bringing the 2022/23 matters to court. The Court rejected the notion that the delay caused “real detriment” in circumstances where the offender had been repeatedly returned to custody for breach/recall and had committed further offending, culminating in renewed dealing in 2025. In effect, any “hanging over” prejudice argument was weak on these facts and could not justify the limited overall term.

(4) Sequencing error: guilty plea discount after mitigation

The Court agreed the recorder applied the guilty plea discount at the wrong stage. Under guideline method, mitigation is addressed before the Step dealing with reduction for guilty plea; reversing that order can mathematically inflate the reduction. The Court noted that, on the recorder’s own numbers, the sequencing produced an over-reduction (quantified as six months). While not independently sufficient to render the 2025 sentence unduly lenient, it supported the conclusion that the final total was too low once totality was properly addressed.

(5) Mitigation: youth, maturity, and mental health vulnerability

Notably, the Court did not dismantle the recorder’s mitigation assessment wholesale. It accepted that the offender’s youth and very low maturity (as assessed in the pre-sentence report) were relevant to culpability and decision-making, and it treated “vulnerability” described in the psychiatric evidence as supporting some reduction. The appellate intervention was therefore grounded less in a disagreement about personal mitigation and more in the structural failure to reflect distinct offending episodes in the total sentence.

C. Impact

Sentencing practice for “drug line” repeat dealing: courts should treat renewed dealing after arrest, especially while on bail, as a distinct tranche requiring tangible reflection in sentence (uplift and/or partial consecutivity), rather than assuming it would have been “rolled up” without significant effect.
Totality analysis becomes evidence-led and tranche-sensitive: similarity of offending does not automatically justify concurrency; what matters is whether the episodes are overlapping or represent a renewed course of conduct after intervention (arrest/bail/sentence).
Delay arguments are contextual: where a defendant’s intervening conduct includes repeated breach, recall, and reoffending, delay is less likely to carry meaningful mitigating weight.
Methodology matters: errors in guideline sequencing for plea reductions may not always be decisive, but they can materially affect outcomes and will be scrutinised in section 36 references.

4) Complex Concepts Simplified

Unduly lenient (section 36 Criminal Justice Act 1988): Not merely “a bit low”. It means a sentence is outside the range that a reasonable sentencing judge could impose. The Court of Appeal intervenes only in exceptional cases.
Totality: A principle ensuring that when sentencing for multiple offences, the final overall term is just and proportionate to the whole offending. It does not require arithmetic addition of sentences; rather, it requires the court to ensure each distinct piece of criminality is properly reflected.
Concurrent vs consecutive sentences: Concurrent sentences run at the same time (so the longest term usually determines the total). Consecutive sentences run one after another (increasing the total). Courts often use partial concurrency or uplift to achieve totality.
Guilty plea discount sequencing: Guidelines generally require the court to set a provisional sentence (including aggravation/mitigation) and then apply the percentage reduction for the guilty plea. Doing it earlier can produce too great a reduction.

5) Conclusion

[2026] EWCA Crim 651 is a clear reminder that totality is not satisfied by selecting a lead sentence and ordering broad concurrency where the offender’s criminality comprises distinct, repeated tranches of the same serious conduct—particularly when one tranche is a deliberate resumption while on bail. Even where personal mitigation (youth, low maturity, vulnerability) justifies a generous approach to the lead offence, the sentencing court must still ensure that other episodes and additional offences are meaningfully reflected in the overall term, by uplift and/or consecutivity. Here, failure to do so rendered 30 months outside the reasonable range, and the Court substituted an overall sentence of five years.