<with held> wrote:
Subject: Unfortunate Australian Lady
Dear Sir Orsm, I am pleased to say that I have sent a recommendation to Downing Street that you be considered for a Knighthood for Services to the Web. I do hope the Prime Minister takes this up with your Government and duly agrees.

My point, however, was largely about the unfortunate Australian lady who appears to have got herself embroiled in a little local difficulty in Bali. Obviously all civilised readers would agree that the sentence imposed was somewhat disproportionate to the crime. My sympathies certainly are with her.

We should all not forget that drugs of any kind pose a real threat to the social fabric of so many of our countries. Bali and Singapore do not suffer the same consequences due to their severe penalties. I strongly believe that instead of judging the sovereign actions of other nations, we should instead reflect upon the lenient sentences our own countries impose for drug related crimes.

1st point is that it is hydroponically grown which makes make it stronger and of higher quality.

2nd point is that westerners over in Bali are too shit scared of buying drugs over there for fear of being arrested by the cops. In many of the situattion over there the cops actually sell it on the streets then follow them and bust them. Reconfiscate the drugs and also get an arrest out of it. Therefore they like to buy off fellow westerners to feel secure, so the going rate is higher.

I am no sure how accurate this is but i have heard it alot on actual news channels, not channels that are going to gain from it financially. The larger commercial channels are gaining alot of financial benefit from this case, so dont take everything you see for what it is.

Anyway I have had my say i still personally don't know whether or not she is guilty, but it is now as black and white as alot of people believe it to be.

Watto wrote:
Subject: Shapelle Corby's Case
G'day Mr Orsm, Great site mate, keep up the good work. Reading comments here and there re Indonesia's allegedly crook legal system makes the following article rather interesting reading to say the least. Make of what you will.

Tourist case similar to Corby's'
By Jade Bilowol
June 2, 2005

AUSTRALIA has been the villain in Japan for jailing one of its citizens in a drug-smuggling case that mirrors Schapelle Corby's plight, according to a leading criminologist.

Gold Coast-based Professor Paul Wilson, who testified on behalf of Corby at her trial for smuggling 4.1kg of marijuana into Bali, said today that Japanese tourist Chika Honda had been a victim of a miscarriage of justice.

Honda, then 29, was jailed for more than 10 years after heroin was found in her suitcase in Melbourne in 1992.

She was one of four tourists found with heroin in false panels in their suitcases when they landed in Melbourne Airport.

They have never stopped protesting their innocence, and like Corby, say they were unwitting drug couriers, Prof Wilson said.

The four had maintained that when a van containing their luggage was stolen during a stop-over at Kuala Lumpur, a fifth man told them their suitcases had been found but were damaged so their belongings had been transferred to new luggage.

Prof Wilson said Honda, who has since been deported back to Japan after spending 10-and-a-half years in Victorian jails, was still trying to clear her name after losing "the best years of her life".

He said many of the cultural differences blasted by Australians during Corby's trial and in the wake of her 20-year sentence had been evident in Honda's trial.

"There have been three major Japanese documentaries made about this case and there was real anger in Japan about how the Australian media and courts treated Chika Honda and others accused – it was just as strong as the Australians feel for Corby," Prof Wilson said.

"It can happen in Australia and it did – there were large cultural differences and translation errors and in the media there was this general discussion about the role of the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia."

Prof Wilson, Bond University's head of criminology, said cultural differences went to the extent where the four were not considered genuine tourists because they had not brought cameras to Australia.

He said Honda's failure to aggressively assert her innocence, which is deemed as culturally appropriate in Japan, was seen by the Australian court as a sign of guilt.

Prof Wilson said he had studied Honda's case for five years and was so convinced of her innocence he was preparing a petition to the Governor-General asking for her conviction to be nullified on the basis of new evidence yet to be revealed.

"Australians should realise so-called miscarriages of justice occur here – we should be very careful before we say that we have this perfect system that doesn't discriminate between other cultures because the Chika Honda case clearly shows it does," Professor Wilson said.

AAP

Corby and the mob
Andrew Bolt
01jun05

AND now to the verdict on the Schapelle Corby case. I find the defendant guilty of xenophobia, spite, boorishness and a self-righteous tribal hysteria.

No, I don't mean Corby.

I'm referring to the weeping and bellowing mob that is demanding we do all it takes -- even starve the poorest Indonesians -- to free this convicted drug trafficker. "Our" Schapelle.

What a shock to see the beast of mob rule roar like this, and in support of a woman who seems on the evidence more likely to be guilty than she's painted.

Yes, Corby may be as innocent as she says. But picture how she must look, and how we all now look, to an Indonesian, whether a judge or a citizen.

Here is a surfer girl who worked as a bar hostess in Tokyo's nightclub area, flying into Bali for reportedly the fifth time in six years.

(Corby, a student beautician who'd scraped up cash from working at a fish-and-chip shop, told 60 Minutes she'd been to Bali "five or six times since I was 16".)

Customs officials screen her bags and detect something suspicious. They watch her, and later tell a court she seems nervous. Her bodyboard bag is more than twice its usual weight, bulging with an extra something the size of a stuffed pillow.

Actually, she says later, she'd only dragged her bag, and had so much other luggage she couldn't tell its weight was unusual, or that there was anything inside but a bodyboard and flippers. Yes, well.

Two police and two customs officials agree on what happened next. They say Corby's brother James carried the bag for her to the customs area, where officer I Gusti Nyoman Winata asked her to open it.

Corby zipped open the front pocket. Now the main zip, demanded Winata. "The suspect (seemed) to panic," he later testified. "When I opened the bag a little bit, she stopped me and said, 'No!' "I asked why. She answered, 'I have some . . .' She looked confused."

ABC's Lateline showed Winata re-enacting Corby's lunge to stop him opening her bag. He seemed as honest as Corby does, and said he had no doubt of her guilt.

Winata looked inside and found 4.1kg of top-quality marijuana, stowed in two airlock plastic bags, one tucked inside the other.

What is it, he asked?

"It's marijuana," the officials heard Corby reply.

Keep thinking how this all must look to an Indonesian. Who would you believe?

Think how it seems when the marijuana turns out to be hydroponically grown, and worth anywhere up to $80,000 in Bali, where it is prized by expatriates who are sick of the weak local weed and feel safer buying from a tourist. Big profits.

Keep picturing. The Indonesians learn that Corby, although having no criminal record, comes from a wild and woolly family.

One of her brothers is in jail for burglary and stealing, her mother is on to her fourth partner after having six children by three men. Her father had a minor conviction some 30 years ago for possessing marijuana.

Sure, none of that makes her guilty, but how would all this make Corby seem to an Indonesian? Here's a tip: Not like she came from the responsible land of the straight-and-narrow.

It gets worse. Corby's defence team is soon headed by a salesman who looks like a spiv and is a former bankrupt who still owes creditors plenty.

Her main defence witness becomes an alleged rapist flown in from a Melbourne jail to tell how he heard some crook who'd heard some other crook say Corby was unwittingly carrying drugs for crooks operating at the Brisbane and Sydney airport terminals.

With Australians like this behind Corby, it's a wonder the whole country wasn't tossed into the cell with her.

The judges are then asked to believe these unknown smugglers took the marijuana into a high-security area at Brisbane in easy-to-see-through plastic and popped it into a random bag to be flown to another high-security area in Sydney.

Why the smugglers would do that, rather than simply drive the drugs down to Sydney by car, all safe, no one can say. That they then let their valuable drugs fly off to Bali is another mystery.

No wonder our own Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty dismissed Corby's theory as "flimsy". Corby's judges must have thought her team took them for idiots.

Idiots? They soon learned plenty of Australians took them for far worse. And now it was not Corby on trial, and losing, but Australia.

In one heady spasm, hundreds of thousands of Australians became certain that Corby the beautiful battler was in fact innocent.

Suddenly she was the star of a reality-TV Perils of Pauline -- complete with cartoon-like big breasts, every-woman prettiness and more tears than a soapie. It helped the plot that she was repeatedly filmed hands bound and besieged, pale in a jabbering, jostling crowd of brown foreigners.

Damn those natives. "The judges don't even speak English, mate, they're straight out of the trees, if you excuse my expression," raged 2GB Sydney fill-in host Malcolm T. Elliott.

"Whoa, give them a banana and away they go."

Others screamed that the judges were lying Muslims out for revenge (in fact, the chief judge was a Christian, and the other two Hindus).

Newspapers attacked Indonesia's courts as corrupt and their jails as temples of "gloating sadism" where there was "little sympathy of foreigners, for which you may perhaps read Christians". Save "our" Schapelle from the demon heathen!

No surprise, then, that Indonesian officials here were bombarded with so many threats and insults that Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer had to plead for them to be left alone. What would we say of Indonesians if our own diplomats were monstered like this?

Now Corby's defenders demand we boycott struggling Bali. Actor Russell Crowe, among others, even warned Indonesia to remember we gave money for its tsunami victims -- as if we only gave charity in exchange for passes out of jail.

Sick, but the feeling has grown. The Salvation Army, out on its Red Shield appeal, had to promise not to send donations to Indonesia. Let their poor suffer for "our" Schapelle.

Meanwhile, radio hosts insisted the Prime Minister call the Indonesian President to fix things in court for Corby, as if such interference wasn't plainly corrupt.

Worryingly, even senior politicians lost their heads in the hysteria, with Justice Minister Chris Ellison vowing to try bringing Corby home in a "one-off" prisoner exchange. The other 150 Australians in jail overseas should get breast implants.

HAVE we lost our heads? Are we really such a vile rabble?

What must Indonesians make of this hissing mob that threatens their diplomats, vilifies their country, blackmails them with aid and treats their judges as the corrupt playthings of our politicians? And all this for the sake of a convicted drug smuggler who seems quite probably guilty, and only possibly innocent.

Even our whinges about their drug laws must seem bizarre. Guess who truly has the worst laws -- Indonesia, which gave Corby 20 years' jail for having 4.1kg of marijuana; or Victoria, which meanwhile gave a mere 12-month community service order to a teacher found with 29kg -- and let her keep her teaching licence?

So how must we seem to Indonesians? Like barbarians, or even terrorists, and it's hard at the moment to think them very wrong.

HeraldSun.com.au