Corby's drug trial and Australian public opinion

Corby's drug trial and Australian public opinion

Endy M. Bayuni, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The 20-year prison term meted out by a court in Bali against Schapelle Corby on Friday for smuggling cannabis into the country is not the end of the road as far as her legal fight is concerned, but if there is one important lesson we can learn from the trial, it is that the massive public campaign in Australia, her home country, for her release has, at times, gone overboard and probably not helped her case at all.

We likely may never know for sure if the judges in the Denpasar District Court determined the sentence solely on the basis of evidence presented before them, or whether other factors, including undue outside pressure, influenced their decision. But we do know for sure that the sentence is rather severe even by Indonesian standards.

Corby was found guilty of attempting to smuggle 4.1 kilograms of marijuana through the Denpasar airport in October. Compare her verdict with what other foreigners have received in Bali, and one has to admit that she has had the harshest punishment of all when compared to other similar cases.

A Mexican woman who smuggled 15.22 kg of marijuana received only a seven-year prison term in December 2001. An Italian man was sentenced to 15 years in July last year for attempting to smuggle 5.3 kg of cocaine, a much more dangerous drug. Corby did not smuggle cocaine and the amount of marijuana she was accused of smuggling is far less than what the Mexican woman brought in. Yet, she got a harsher sentence.

One thing that was evident from the beginning is that Corby never faced the death sentence as was widely and wildly suggested by the Australian media. Not one person in Indonesia, foreigner or otherwise, has been sentenced to death for trafficking marijuana. All the death penalty cases have involved large amounts of cocaine, heroin or ecstasy.

Corby's relatives and friends, along with the Australian media, succeeded in whipping up massive public support and sympathy at home by playing the death penalty card. The prospect of the 27-year beautician facing an Indonesian firing squad certainly played on the emotions of most Australians. Such over- dramatization of her case in Australia is partly to blame for the death threats received by Indonesians in Australia as well as all the other forms of anti-Indonesia sentiment we have seen in recent weeks.

Australian newspaper polls, which found that 90 percent of Australians believe Corby is innocent, and a victim of a drug syndicate, of course had no relevance on the court hearing in Bali. A person is found guilty or innocent on the basis of evidence brought before the court and not by public opinion.

But the diatribes by the Australian public and media against the Indonesian legal system while the trial was still in progress have certainly been very unhelpful. The Indonesian courts have their flaws, probably more so than the Australian courts, but it was dead wrong for the Australian public and media to prejudge the court, even to the point of dismissing its ability to act fairly in dispensing justice, before it reached the verdict.

Australian politicians both in and outside the government -- whose intentions were clearly more political in nature, rather than the well-being of Corby -- jumped on the bandwagon to appeal to the Indonesian authorities on her behalf. They should know that such a move was premature, and could have been easily construed here as an unwelcome interference into the Indonesian legal system.

Looking back, one cannot help get the feeling that Australia's media hype in covering Corby's trial almost became a self- fulfilling prophecy on Friday. Even in finding her guilty, there was no reason for the judges to hand down such a harsh penalty, and even less so for the prosecutors to demand a life sentence in the first place. One can only conclude from here that both the judges and the prosecutors have been influenced by what was happening outside the court.

This becomes clearer if we look at the case of Clara Elena Umana, the Mexican who was sentenced by the same court in 2001 to seven years. She got just a third of the sentence that Corby received, for smuggling more than three times the marijuana. With sentence reductions through good behavior, the Mexican woman will likely only end up serving a little more than half the sentence.

In light of this, looking back now, we wonder, hypothetically, how many years Corby would have received if there had not been so much public pressure and publicity supposedly waged on her behalf in Australia during the trial. Going by the Mexican woman's case, Corby should have been given three or four years.

Ordinarily, this would have been just another drug trial involving a foreigner, and because of the type and amount of drug involved, Corby would probably have gotten off lightly. But, since the Australian media and public opinion decided from the beginning that this was going be a special case, and even turning it into a cause celebre, the Denpasar district court inevitably, though perhaps inadvertently, treated this as a special case too.

Fortunately, the district court is not the last dispenser of justice in Indonesia.

Corby still has the right to appeal to the High Court, and potentially, the Supreme Court. Judges in those higher courts have the ability to assess the case and the evidence presented in the lower courts more soberly, away from the media spotlight. Ideally, they should be allowed to work without any form of outside undue pressure.

The sympathy and support that Corby receives from her compatriots, who believe in her innocence, are laudable. But her family and friends, and the Australian public, in general, would be helping her cause far more by restraining themselves in their comments on the Indonesian legal system, and allowing the legal process to run its full course. If they still hope for justice for Corby to come from these higher courts, they have to believe in them, or at the very least, let them do their work uninterrupted.

The writer is chief editor of The Jakarta Post.