I just caught the news about that poor australian woman…20 years for bringing 8 kilos of marijuana into Bali. The scumbag who murderd over 100 (in the nightclub bombing) got 2 1/2. Is this justice?
Anybody familiar with this case-are the Indonesians amd at the Aussies for some reason?
Will she have to serve her time in a squalid Indonesian prison? Or will they (once the furor dies down) quietly transfer her to Autralia, to serve her time close to home.
Any chance this poor girl was framed?
I read that two Bali bombers got the death penalty and another got life because of the remorse he displayed.
Do you have a cite for this 2/12 year sentence?
Rats. 2 1/2
A major part of her defence was that she had been framed. Many, many Australians take it for granted that this is true, and she has become quite the celebrity here. Being young and cute didnt hurt.
Australia and Indonesia are often ‘mad’ at each other though how relevant that has been I couldnt say. In defence circles Indonesia has often been regarded as our only real enemy, and I have heard our desire to retain the F-111s in service was so that we maintain the Djakarta option as its sometimes called. There is considerable resentment amongst many indonesians over our intervention in East Timor, and over assorted diplomatic gaffes by our current Prime Minister. All in all though we get along fairly well, generally, usually.
This case has obssessed Australia and yesterday my workplace and most others stopped at the time of the sentence and verdict annoucement to watch, and its been everywhere since.
There is a lot of anger at the unjustness of the sentence, and much talk of doing a transfer arrangement to get her back in country.
I hit post too early.
If she is transferred back to Australia she will unfortunately still have to serve out the full sentence, that will be the terms. Possibly this can be re-negotiated in a couple of years.
Indonesia also currently holds another nine australian citizens on heroin smuggling charges. In their case there is no doubt they are guilty as they were found with large quantities of heroin strapped to their bodies. They will likely hang, and I havent seen any real sympathy for them amongst the public. It is well known in Australia after other cases that our neighbours have very strict drug laws, and Australian citizens have previously been executed. Heroin smugglers dont attract sympathy here. With Corby it was different, because other then being a bit of a honey, the attitude is that she has been framed because no one smuggles dope into Bali (its like smuggling ice to Antartica and a massive economic loss given respective prices), and anyway even if she did, it was only dope.
The judge that convicted her has previously conducted over 500 drug cases. It attracted a lot of attention here when he was assigned the case as he has never acquitted or found innocent a single defendant.
The wording is a tad ambiguos, but legion seems correct: 2 of the 3 key Bali bombers got the death sentence while one got life: http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/003918.php
19 of their compatriots got sentence reductions. I’m not really sure how much help they gave, but there you go.
I have no cite but I vaguely remember that there was a lot of public outrage here (Aust.) a couple of years ago because one of the ringleaders in the Bali bombings had his death sentence commuted to just a couple of years in prison.
I think what Ralph screwed up is that the cleric Abu Bakar Bashir who was initially accused of having ordered and planned the bombing was found innocent of those charges. He was found guilty of a charge of what basically amounted to aiding people who he knew were terrorists and reasonably suspected were up to no good. He was sentenced to 30 months for that crime. I’d hardly say that was an inappropriate penalty for what is ultimately a minor crime.
Apparently that isn’t even close to being true. Low grade cultivated marijuana is widely available in Bali and very cheap because peasants can grow it. High-grade hydroponic marijuana such as Corby was smuggling is a premium product because wealthy Indonesians who could afford hydroponics equipment won’t take the risk. It commands very high prices, much higher than you’d get in Australia.
According to four sources in Bali contacted by The Age, including one former and one current drug dealer, high-quality Australian marijuana, similar in appearance to that found in Schapelle Corby’s luggage, has been sold on a limited basis in Bali for years, but only to Westerners.
One European man, now serving a jail term for possessing hashish, said he knows of several Australians who have been bringing strong hydroponic marijuana into Bali.
He said it brings “really good money”, getting a price around 50 per cent higher than the Nepalese hashish that is more widely available for around $A16 a gram on the streets.
An Australian who says he’s lived in Bali for 15 years contacted The Age several times to say his children were frequently offered marijuana called “Aussie gold”. The man, who refused to give his name, said the “hydroponic bud” smuggled from Australia sells for $A600 an ounce (about $A21 a gram) or as much as $A20,000 a kilogram.
Top quality marijuana in Australia sells for around $8000 a kilogram, although more when broken into “deals”
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/05/25/1116950758434.html?from=top5&oneclick=true
Well firstly lets clear away the idea that we should be shocked at the sentence. If you didn’t know that Southeast Asian/Oceanic countries like Myanmar, Indonesia, and Singapore had incredibly strict drug laws then you have been fairly uninformed (Myanmar and Singapore much stricter than Indonesia.)
People are routinely executed in all three countries for drug crimes. I don’t think this particularly needs to be a debate about whether that is right or wrong. The fact is Corby has been going back and forth to Bali for many years and she had to have known the incredibly penalty possession would bring (if she’s guilty.)
And, while we can lambast these laws from afar, I think all of us agree that it is only rational and sensible to obey these laws when we travel to those countries.
I’ve vacationed on the beaces of Bali several times. And, I will say this with all respect to Australians but “your section” of the beach is known to be a place of excessive partying and indeed lots of drug use.
So I have a certain perspective that leaves me somewhat unsurprised.
From my experience over there I’ve also got a pretty good handle on the fact that it probably wasn’t a frame-up by the Indonesian government. In general the Indonesians are very corrupt. I’ve learned (and others have posted about this on this message board) that there are times and places where you bribe an official in Indonesia as standard policy or they make your life “difficult.” But in my experience making you life “difficult” to the point of sending you to prison for 20 years is way out of whack with anything I’ve ever seen or heard. Usually if you don’t go along with the bribes you are inconvenienced for several hours (for example your bags may be held up for 10 hours or something like that.)
Also to elaborate on some points made here, it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary at all for Corby to be smuggling Australian weed into Indonesia to sell to other Aussies over there partying (and she’d have made quite a penny doing it.)
The problem I do have is it certainly doesn’t appear that she got a fair trial from any objective standpoint (though I’m sure under Indonesian law her trial was fair.) The criminal justice system is very corrupt in Indonesia, her best chance of getting out of this situation if she was truly innocent would have been to keep it quiet and tried to have her family back home wire many thousands of dollars over to Indonesia for the purposes of bribing some key people.
However having no real access to the evidence I’ve seen nothing that shows me she was really innocent. I have seen the fact that she possessed alot of marijuan, and I think that is legitimate, I think she was found with it I do not think the Indonesian government planted it there.
Aside from the possibility that she did it there is a possibility that it was placed in her bag by drug smugglers/baggage handlers. That’s possible although from what I heard the evidence that came up about other incidents of this happening had nothing to do with the current case and there is no evidence that this happened in her case.
I’ve also heard she made a confession, though that means little to me as confessions are easy to get, just about as easy to get from someone who is innocent as they are from someone who is guilty.
I lean towards her being guilty, primarily because I don’t think professional drug smugglers would stash drugs in a boogie board bag, that is very amateurish. It’s possible she’s innocent though, considering the state of Indonesian Justice if I was John Howard I’d be throwing a huge fit unless my people had clear evidence she was guilty.
But you’re extrapolating from your personal observation of some Australian tourists that Corby was also that type of person. She may well not have been. The fact that she was there to visit her sister for the first time in several years, after spending time caring for her cancer-stricken father, suggests an alternative view of her character. None of this is or should count as legally relevant evidence.
The great problem, of course, is that the Indonesian police reportedly refused to allow the bag containing the marijuana to be tested for fingerprints. If Corby’s fingerprints were NOT found on the bag…well, there’s a piece of relevant defence-friendly evidence right there, the potential of which was never allowed to be realised.
Yeah, why is this?
It’s been suggested that Corby is innocent, not because she was framed by the Indonesian government, but because baggage handlers in Aussie airports were using passengers as unsuspecting mules. The idea is that baggage handlers on either end put the drugs into customer’s bags, then take them out before the bags are returned to public areas.
This investigation by Sunday, a program known for it’s serious journalism, uncovered issues with baggage security in Australian airports. There’s a transcript of the whole story at the bottom of the summary I’ve linked to.
If that’s the case, then it could well be that the job was botched on Corby’s bag, and that the suspicious parts of the Indonesian investigation were just because they don’t go to the effort of proper procedures for a tourist.