Bali drug bust
I’m opposed to capital punishment, but have little sympathy for the nine Australians charged with drug trafficking in Indonesia this week.
I’ve travelled overseas and I always respected the laws and customs in foreign countries.
I was apprehended in Malawi for accidentally bumbling up to the front gates of President Banda’s palace in Blantyre.
I spent several nervous hours in a police station, pretending I was a public servant in the Agriculture Department instead of a journalist! In the same city I refrained from photographing the President’s procession on advice from local police.
At Singapore Airport I was asked by an Indian man to carry his “excess” luggage to Mauritius, even with the offer of a fee. If I’d taken the suitcase, and if it contained drugs, I might today be dead or languishing in a fetid prison cell.
Capital punishment is wrong, but we have to respect the laws of other countries. The risks were known to these nine people. If any are ultimately executed that’s tragic, but it may well serve to warn others.
I'm a 41-year-old father of four working as a newspaper editor at Mount Gambier in South Australia.
April 21st, 2005 at 7:23 pm
Why is capital punishment wrong? Shouldn’t someone who kills another person deserve to die?
April 21st, 2005 at 11:11 pm
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April 25th, 2005 at 8:49 pm
Fair enough. If nine people were trying to smuggle drugs into Australia then they do deserve the applicable punishment. However, it did not work like that. Many did not do it out of choice. They were threatened and had got themselves into something they had no idea about when they started. They would have been killed if they didn’t do it and maybe their families too. I have known one of them since he was five (from school), and he has lived in my neighbourhood all of this time. Don’t know him well, but he does not deserve this.
April 25th, 2005 at 8:57 pm
To MEJ, I think there’s a lot more to come out about what actually happened. It’s going to be a tough one for the courts. Every future drug mule will use the “threat” defence if this one works.
April 26th, 2005 at 8:52 pm
I don’t think using the story - even if it is true, that they and their families were threatend with violence if they never did as they were told would carry any weight with the stone hearted Indonesian Judges.
I can’t understand for the life of me how anyone would say yes to $10,000 to carry a parcel back into Australia without someone telling them what they were carrying. That alone should have told them something was wrong. They were flying into one of the biggest dope Capitols of the World - what did they think they were going to carry back in little brown paper bags that was worth the money being paid - their lunch?
Do I think they were stupid “yes”. Do I think they deserve to die “no”. It is a very sad fact that while stupidity is not a crime - carrying and involving yourself with drugs is. I would advise any other would be drug carrier to use the brain they were given - wake up - learn by the mistakes of others. You might think you are bulletproof - but you are not.
Think of what you are doing to those people and children that use the drugs then think about yourself - get caught overseas, especially in Asian countries, your tears, sick health, pushing the blame on others - even if they deserve it, won’t get you one day less on your sentence, and it won’t stop a bullet….