Kenyan drug dealer gets life sentence
Kenyan drug dealer gets life sentence
Urip Hudiono, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
A Kenyan defendant escaped the noose on Tuesday, when the Central
Jakarta District Court decided to show mercy by sentencing him to
life imprisonment for drug trafficking.
The sentence is much more lenient than the maximum penalty of
death sought by prosecutors of Okeke Nelson Sunday Orange Moa
Mwangai, 29, for attempting to smuggle 1.129 kilograms of heroin
into the country.
Tuesday's verdict comes a day after the Attorney General's
Office announced that President Megawati Soekarnoputri had
rejected appeals for leniency from seven convicts on death row
for drug-related cases.
The appeals included those of Thai citizens Saelon Praseart
and Namson Sirilak, who were convicted along with Indian citizen
Ayodya Prashad Chaubey, of smuggling 12.9 kilograms of heroin.
Ayodya was executed by firing squad last Thursday.
Presiding judge Agus Subroto said that witness testimonies and
evidence presented to the court were sufficient to find Mwangai
guilty as charged of violating Article 82 of Law No. 22/1997 on
narcotics, for the illegal smuggling of the most highly
controlled drug.
"The defendant's action in packing the heroin into capsules
which he later ingested to avoid detection was evidence of a
smuggling attempt," Agus said.
Nigerian-born Mwangai confessed he was promised US$20,000 by a
friend, Ikena, in December to transport the heroin from Karachi
to Denpasar via Bangkok and finally to Jakarta, where he would
then deliver the heroin to Anselem, a Nigerian citizen.
Ikena had instructed him to split the heroin into 67 rubber
capsules, which he then swallowed, to elude inspection at airport
checkpoints.
The Jakarta Police narcotics division, which received a tipoff
about Mwangai's arrival in January, arrested him at a hotel in
Tanah Abang, Central Jakarta. The capsules were detected in a
hospital X-ray examination and were later confirmed by the police
forensic laboratory as containing heroin.
The court took into consideration that the defendant's action
could have caused irreparable mental and physical harm to the
nation's youth if the drugs he had tried to smuggle had ever
reached the streets.
In mitigation, the court found the defendant had confessed and
showed remorse for his crimes, and was fully cooperative during
the trial.
Prosecutor Fajar Rudi was slightly disappointed at the
verdict, as the judges had differed in the appropriate sentence
for the defendant, although they agreed with the prosecution in
finding the defendant guilty as charged.
"Defendants in similar cases, which involve drugs in similar
amounts, usually get the death sentence," he said. "We are
thinking about filing an appeal."