As the 8 men were taken from their cells for execution on Nusa Kambangan, the sole woman, Mary Jane Fiesta Veloso, a Philippine national, stayed in isolation. She had just received a last minute stay. From the very beginning when arrested at the Yogyakarta airport after carrying 2.6 kgs of heroin off an Air Asia flight from Kuala Lumpur, the lady had protested her innocence. Veloso claimed that she'd been the victim of human trafficking. This had been brought to the attention of the Indonesian Government, but it had carried no weight .... until yesterday. At the eleventh hour, a woman handed herself into the Philippine police, claiming that she had in fact been responsible for Veloso's plight. The lady known as Christine or Cristina, said that she's secured Veloso a domestic job in Kuala Lumpur, but upon arrival, the job vanished. Christina then asked Veloso to go to Yogyakarta in Indonesia. She was given a suitcase and $500 expense money. On arrest, she was given neither legal help or a translator in her initial interrogation at Bahasa. Things were not that much better when it came to her trial. The translator placed at her services was a student at a foreign language school in Yogyakarta. He was not licensed by the Association of Indonesian Translators. Added to this was the fact that Veloso had minimal understanding of English. When found guilty, prosecutors asked that she be given life in prison, the judges sided with the death penalty. That Mary Jane Fiesta Veloso is still breathing today came down to another human being deciding that she could no longer live with what was about to happen. Veloso will have to give evidence at Christine's trial, but that in itself does not guarantee freedom or life for Mary Jane, but it's at least a step in the right direction.
I know you are passionate about this cyc and fair play but any sympathy I may have stops at the point where it says she had 2.6kgs of heroin in her luggage! If you traffic drugs you pay the consequences when you get caught. If you traffic drugs into Indonesia that means the death penalty. You always have a choice!
Agree Stick, these guys were not nice people when they got into this stuff. They knew the risks and they paid the price. Every country has the right to frame their laws to suit themselves, the issue at hand is capital punishment. It's a concept that thankfully is slowly starting to be phased out across the planet. The ramifications of capital punishment are massive, especially in view of the possible miscarriage of justice. In the case of these guys, they were as guilty as, but when placed beside a case in Bali where a woman and her boy friend murdered her mother and got 10 years, the execution of the bloke who was caught with 50 grams of smack, it all seems a bit out of kilter. Nice to see the Irish make a statement here.
