# Verdict was just, sentence mild: experts
# Demand for Aussie marijuana was there
# Brother is in jail for drug possession
# Dad was fined for having marijuana
May 30, 2005
WHY would anyone smuggle marijuana into Bali when it's supposed to be cheaper there? And why would a pretty girl with good prospects do such a stupid thing anyway?
That's the thinking behind the outpouring of vitriol in Australia after 27-year-old Schapelle Corby was found guilty and jailed for 20 years by a Bali court on Friday for drug trafficking.
But, swamped by the chorus of calls for tourism boycotts, diplomatic protests, court appeals and even the return of tsunami donations, were the voices of Aussie legal experts who believe the Bali judges made the right decision.
Separate the emotion from the evidence, they argue, and the case against the former beauty school student would have had her convicted in any country.
Other reports pointed out that she's not the innocent-abroad her supporters have portrayed her as.
THE EVIDENCE
A 4.1kg bag of marijuana was found in Corby's bodyboard cover at Bali airport on 8 Oct last year.
Corby admitted she owned the long, flat bag and lifted it off the baggage carousel herself, apparently without noticing it weighed more than twice what a bodyboard should and had a pillow-sized lump in it.
Four Balinese customs officers and policemen testified that she tried to prevent an official from opening the bag. She had been under surveillance since an x-ray of the bag detected drugs before it was loaded onto the carousel.
These facts gave the prosecutor a 'substantial case', the director of the Asian Law Centre at the University of Melbourne, Professor Tim Lindsey, told The Australian.
'This is her bag, in the bag was found the cannabis,' he said. 'In any legal system in the world, that would establish a prima-facie case.'
Other legal experts told the paper that an Australian judge would find a person guilty on that evidence.
Corby's lawyers argued that anyone could have slipped the drugs into the unlocked bag, and suggested corrupt baggage handlers were to blame.
But their argument rested on the word of an Australian rape suspect seeking a plea bargain who claimed to have overheard other inmates discussing a lost package of drugs, a baggage handler who said such a scam was possible, and a bundle of papers alleging a cocaine smuggling ring was operating between Australian airports.
Such 'hearsay on hearsay' would not have been admissible in an Australian court, legal experts told the paper.
The defence also claimed that Bali airport officials failed to videotape their search, dust for fingerprints or provide a translator.
The Balinese officials testified that they didn't need to: They knew there were drugs in Corby's bag before she collected it - and they spoke to her in English.
'The verdict is not surprising bearing in mind that all the defence could rely on was poor police practice and hearsay about lax airport security,' Dr Mark Findlay, from the Institute of Criminology at the University of Sydney, told the Sydney Morning Herald.
'Even in Australia, if (she) was found in possession of the bag, and the bag is hers and she says it is her bag, and if there's no other evidence to challenge that, then that could be enough to convict her,' he said.
He also noted that the sentence was 'remarkably light sentence for what is, in Indonesia, a serious narcotics crime'.
THE FLAWED LOGIC
Why would anyone smuggle drugs into Indonesia, which upholds the death penalty for such a crime?
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, for Westerners who live in Bali, buying marijuana locally is extremely risky, as the seller could be an undercover cop or police informer.
So, they will pay a premium to buy it off another Westerner.
The paper quoted four sources as saying that high-quality Australian marijuana had long been sold on a limited basis to Westerners living in Bali.
One Caucasian, jailed in Bali for drug possession, claimed he knew several Australians who smuggled marijuana into Bali because it was more expensive than local varieties and more potent.
Another expatriate in Bali said his children were often offered such 'Aussie gold' for A$600 ($1,000) an ounce.
A Balinese drug dealer said Australian-grown marijuana was made up of large buds and had a much greater effect than the marijuana he sold, which had small buds and was more leafy.
'It's safer for foreigners to bring their own,' he told the paper. 'It's been happening for quite some time.'
Corby had gone to Bali to visit her sister, Ms Mercedes Corby, 30, who lives there. She is married to a Balinese man, Mr Wayan Widiartha, 34, and has two children, Nyeleigh, 4, and Wayan, 5, whom she is raising as Hindus.
Corby's family has repeatedly denied rumours that some of its members are involved with drugs.
But The Australian unearthed court documents that showed her half-brother, Clinton Rose, 22, had an extensive criminal history.
Six weeks before Corby was arrested, he was jailed for 18 months in Brisbane on 62 counts ranging from burglary to fraud. He also has two convictions for drug possession. Corby had visited him in jail before her own arrest.
Her father, Mr Michael Corby, admitted to The Courier Mail that he had been fined A$400 for possessing two grams of marijuana when he was about his daughter's age.
Like his daughter, he maintains to this day that the drugs were not his.
HER HOSTESS PAST
The Bali holiday was not Corby's first overseas trip. In fact, she had lived in Japan for several years.
While working as a supermarket cashier after leaving school, Corby met a Japanese surfer, identified only as Kimi.
She followed him back to Japan, where they married in 1998 in the town of Omaezaki, reported the Courier Mail.
Three months later, Corby left for Tokyo alone, where she worked as a hostess in a bar.
Her uncle, Mr Shun Hatton, told the paper he was outraged by suggestions that she did more than just serve drinks.
'She was definitely not into prostitution. She's a prude,' he said.
Corby returned to Kimi briefly in 2000 but soon returned to Australia. She later divorced and set up home with concreter Shannon McClure, but was single at the time of her arrest.
A hell-hole?
SCHAPELLE Corby now faces spending the next 20 years in a Bali jail that has been widely described as a 'hell-hole' by the Australian media.
But the truth about her living conditions could prove somewhat different.
'For those without money, the lack of necessities can be fatal. But for those with a bit of cash, and friends on hand, life can berelatively tolerable,' reported The Age on Friday.
'Prisoners can eat and drink whatever friends bring them, furnish their cells, own handphones and have full contact visits five days a week, which is unheard of in most jails.'
It quoted Scottish inmate Robert Fraser, 45, as saying: 'It's no hell-hole here. If you are going to be in prison in Asia, this is the place to be.'
Taken from The Electric New Paper
Friday, June 03, 2005
Thursday, June 02, 2005
A fair trial, but not in our media
June 01, 2005
By Paul Kelly
THE media-induced campaign over the Schapelle Corby case is counterproductive for Corby, damaging for our national interest and suggests an immaturity in Australia that will rebound on us as a nation.
The problem begins with the popular media's assumption of Corby's innocence. For many of the shock jocks this is a given. It is the key to the campaign because once you assume a defendant is innocent, then Indonesia's legal system is guilty of an outrageous injustice. The point, of course, is that the media doesn't know that Corby is innocent. It has no justification whatsoever for this assumption. It is natural to be moved and feel sorry at Corby's tragic plight. But it is irresponsible to decide that she is innocent and mount a vast media campaign to this end.
The shock jock fall-back position is that Corby did not get a fair trial, an impression created by the unwise comment of chief judge Linton Sirait that "as far as I can remember in a drugs case I haven't yet set anyone free". Sirait also said he wouldn't be influenced by crying and would decide "solely on the evidence".
For weeks, the University of Melbourne's Asian Law Centre director Tim Lindsey has been warning that Corby's defence was weak on the evidence, despite the absolute denial of the popular media. "This was always going to be a difficult case to defend," Lindsey told me. "It was very easy for the prosecution to establish a prima-facie case and it would have been a prima-facie case anywhere.
"The Indonesian Customs officers said she was reluctant to open the bag and that when it was opened and she was confronted she acknowledged the drugs were hers. Now it may be the Customs officers are lying. But the defence case was always based on denial and the judge had to make a call on the 'they said, she said' issue. It was entirely within the bounds of the court to find the Customs officers were more convincing than the evidence by Schapelle's friends and family. This is a perfectly understandable conclusion for the court to draw. The claim that this is demonstrably an injustice is just foolish.
"This is not a situation of right and wrong. It is about evidence in a court. If we abandon the test of evidence, then we go back to burning witches. For people to say Indonesia's system has failed because they have a feeling Corby is innocent is Lindy Chamberlain in reverse."
It is the weakness of the Corby defence that has led to the claim of an unfair trial, a claim that is unsustainable. The next ploy of the popular media was to blame John Howard and demand that he get her released. This is utterly futile. The Government has leaned over backwards to help, doing things for Corby it has never done for other Australians on drug charges. But Indonesia, a constitutional democracy as well as a proud nation, would never allow Australia's leader to intervene in its judicial system.
It is inconceivable that Indonesia's President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono would approach Howard if the situation was reversed. Howard won't ring Yudhoyono because, as he told Sydney radio station 2GB, it won't help Corby in the slightest. He told Australians to respect the court's decision and not to make a judgment about it, and he was right. For 30 years, since the start of the East Timor saga, Australians have deluded themselves about our ability to change domestic events in Jakarta. When will we learn?
The assumptions that underpin these Australian attitudes are patronising and alarming. ANU Indonesia expert Greg Fealy says: "For a country that casts itself as knowledgeable about Indonesia we have displayed ignorance and misunderstanding. There is a sense in the popular sentiment that our approach is right and that Indonesia reflects a less civilised country."
Corby is lucky that so far this hysterical media campaign has not lodged in Indonesia's political system, but that is changing and it represents a more serious threat.
Fealy warns: "The more this campaign becomes a political issue in Indonesia, then the harder it will become for President Yudhoyono to grant a pardon at a later date or to arrange a prisoner exchange."
Once anti-Australian sentiment ignites in the Indonesian system the consequences for Corby will be even worse. All Australians have an interest in an evidence-based judicial system in Indonesia, as the trial and convictions of the Bali bombers proved. But the popular media's distortion of the Bali trials is the greatest travesty in this story.
This is the same court, the same judge and the same procedure that convicted a few dozen of the Bali bombers and brought down death sentences against three of them. Yet most of popular media not only ignores this but focuses on the light sentence given to extremist cleric Abu Bakar Bashir as a device to manipulate public outrage.
Lindsey says: "The problem in the Abu Bakar Bashir case was that the defence lawyers sliced up the prosecution evidence. He was deemed to be head of Jemaah Islamiah but the difficulty lay in the evidence tying him to the bombing." Once again, the case went on the evidence.
The media has erected a false comparison between the Corby and Bashir cases. In the process it seeks to obliterate the prompt and punitive actions taken by the Indonesian court against the bombers, an action that promoted a sense of public trust in Australia. This is a betrayal of the Bali victims.
"The court ran the Corby trial in much the same way that it ran the Bali bombers trial," Lindsey says.
"After the bombers were sentenced there were people in this country saying they would like to pull the trigger. So we are now being totally hypocritical. Australians can't have it both ways. We like the Indonesian courts when they convict our enemies who are Asian but we won't accept it when they convict a white Australian woman. We're either inconsistent or racist and the Indonesians see this. We love the court for the terrorists and we hate the court for Schapelle Corby. This will do Australia a lot of harm."
As a nation Australia has badly mishandled the Corby case and it has a long way to run. Corby has been let down by her legal team and a reckless popular media.
Taken from The Australian
By Paul Kelly
THE media-induced campaign over the Schapelle Corby case is counterproductive for Corby, damaging for our national interest and suggests an immaturity in Australia that will rebound on us as a nation.
The problem begins with the popular media's assumption of Corby's innocence. For many of the shock jocks this is a given. It is the key to the campaign because once you assume a defendant is innocent, then Indonesia's legal system is guilty of an outrageous injustice. The point, of course, is that the media doesn't know that Corby is innocent. It has no justification whatsoever for this assumption. It is natural to be moved and feel sorry at Corby's tragic plight. But it is irresponsible to decide that she is innocent and mount a vast media campaign to this end.
The shock jock fall-back position is that Corby did not get a fair trial, an impression created by the unwise comment of chief judge Linton Sirait that "as far as I can remember in a drugs case I haven't yet set anyone free". Sirait also said he wouldn't be influenced by crying and would decide "solely on the evidence".
For weeks, the University of Melbourne's Asian Law Centre director Tim Lindsey has been warning that Corby's defence was weak on the evidence, despite the absolute denial of the popular media. "This was always going to be a difficult case to defend," Lindsey told me. "It was very easy for the prosecution to establish a prima-facie case and it would have been a prima-facie case anywhere.
"The Indonesian Customs officers said she was reluctant to open the bag and that when it was opened and she was confronted she acknowledged the drugs were hers. Now it may be the Customs officers are lying. But the defence case was always based on denial and the judge had to make a call on the 'they said, she said' issue. It was entirely within the bounds of the court to find the Customs officers were more convincing than the evidence by Schapelle's friends and family. This is a perfectly understandable conclusion for the court to draw. The claim that this is demonstrably an injustice is just foolish.
"This is not a situation of right and wrong. It is about evidence in a court. If we abandon the test of evidence, then we go back to burning witches. For people to say Indonesia's system has failed because they have a feeling Corby is innocent is Lindy Chamberlain in reverse."
It is the weakness of the Corby defence that has led to the claim of an unfair trial, a claim that is unsustainable. The next ploy of the popular media was to blame John Howard and demand that he get her released. This is utterly futile. The Government has leaned over backwards to help, doing things for Corby it has never done for other Australians on drug charges. But Indonesia, a constitutional democracy as well as a proud nation, would never allow Australia's leader to intervene in its judicial system.
It is inconceivable that Indonesia's President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono would approach Howard if the situation was reversed. Howard won't ring Yudhoyono because, as he told Sydney radio station 2GB, it won't help Corby in the slightest. He told Australians to respect the court's decision and not to make a judgment about it, and he was right. For 30 years, since the start of the East Timor saga, Australians have deluded themselves about our ability to change domestic events in Jakarta. When will we learn?
The assumptions that underpin these Australian attitudes are patronising and alarming. ANU Indonesia expert Greg Fealy says: "For a country that casts itself as knowledgeable about Indonesia we have displayed ignorance and misunderstanding. There is a sense in the popular sentiment that our approach is right and that Indonesia reflects a less civilised country."
Corby is lucky that so far this hysterical media campaign has not lodged in Indonesia's political system, but that is changing and it represents a more serious threat.
Fealy warns: "The more this campaign becomes a political issue in Indonesia, then the harder it will become for President Yudhoyono to grant a pardon at a later date or to arrange a prisoner exchange."
Once anti-Australian sentiment ignites in the Indonesian system the consequences for Corby will be even worse. All Australians have an interest in an evidence-based judicial system in Indonesia, as the trial and convictions of the Bali bombers proved. But the popular media's distortion of the Bali trials is the greatest travesty in this story.
This is the same court, the same judge and the same procedure that convicted a few dozen of the Bali bombers and brought down death sentences against three of them. Yet most of popular media not only ignores this but focuses on the light sentence given to extremist cleric Abu Bakar Bashir as a device to manipulate public outrage.
Lindsey says: "The problem in the Abu Bakar Bashir case was that the defence lawyers sliced up the prosecution evidence. He was deemed to be head of Jemaah Islamiah but the difficulty lay in the evidence tying him to the bombing." Once again, the case went on the evidence.
The media has erected a false comparison between the Corby and Bashir cases. In the process it seeks to obliterate the prompt and punitive actions taken by the Indonesian court against the bombers, an action that promoted a sense of public trust in Australia. This is a betrayal of the Bali victims.
"The court ran the Corby trial in much the same way that it ran the Bali bombers trial," Lindsey says.
"After the bombers were sentenced there were people in this country saying they would like to pull the trigger. So we are now being totally hypocritical. Australians can't have it both ways. We like the Indonesian courts when they convict our enemies who are Asian but we won't accept it when they convict a white Australian woman. We're either inconsistent or racist and the Indonesians see this. We love the court for the terrorists and we hate the court for Schapelle Corby. This will do Australia a lot of harm."
As a nation Australia has badly mishandled the Corby case and it has a long way to run. Corby has been let down by her legal team and a reckless popular media.
Taken from The Australian
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