Where an offender is charged with both a Commonwealth offence of importing a trafficable quantity of narcotic goods and a State offence of possessing the same goods with intent to sell or supply, the sentences should ordinarily be wholly concurrent because the offences are part of one transaction and the intent to traffic overlaps between the two charges. The sentencing judge must exercise particular care to avoid double punishment for the overlapping element of intent to traffic. The totality principle requires the total effective sentence across Commonwealth and State indictments to bear a proper relationship to the overall criminality, and an error in structuring sentences on one indictment may infect the application of totality across all indictments.
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