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.