The saga of Schapelle Corby: The drug smuggling case that gripped Australia
Indonesia grants Corby parole
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Corby, then 27, was arrested at Bali's airport with marijuana in her luggage in 2004
- The Australian trainee beautician insists she was set up
- A Bali court convicts her of drug trafficking, sentencing her to 20 years in prison
- One of the most-watched criminal trials in Australian history ended with her release on Friday
A furrow forms between the 27-year-old's eyebrows as the judge reads out the verdict in Bahasa Indonesia.
Corby appears confused.
Her piercing blue eyes dart around the room -- at her family, at the
cameras broadcasting live to televisions around Australia, at the
ground, at her interpreter. Then reality sets in.
Guilty -- the judge said. Her sentence? Twenty years in a Bali prison.
At the back of the court, members of her family erupt with anger.
"It's not alright! How dare you?" screams her sister, Mercedes.
"We swore on the Bible to tell the truth and your fellow lied!" her mother, Rosleigh Rose, booms at the prosecutors.
As her daughter is led away, Rose makes a promise: "Schapelle, you will come home. Our government will bring you home."
Not since Lindy
Chamberlain claimed a dingo took her baby in the Outback have
Australians become so caught up in a courtroom drama. Nearly nine years
on from the verdict, interest remains strong enough to sustain a
soon-to-be-broadcast Australian telemovie based on the case.
And now Corby will walk out of prison -- on parole but free. Yet Australia remains divided as to whether she is guilty of the crime.
To this day, Corby insists she was an unwitting victim of a botched drug smuggling operation.
The bust
On 8 October 2004, Corby
took a flight with her brother and two friends from Brisbane airport
via Sydney to Bali to celebrate Mercedes' 30th birthday.
When they landed in
Indonesia, customs officials checked their luggage and discovered a
plastic bag containing 4.1 kilograms of marijuana -- the largest seizure
ever made at Bali's Denpasar airport -- in Corby's boogie board bag.
She said she had no idea
how the drugs ended up in her luggage. She hadn't locked the bag
carrying her board so the marijuana must have been planted there, she
argued.
Indonesian authorities
had a different version of events. Customs officers who were at the
airport claimed Corby refused to open the bag when asked -- a claim she
denies. They also said she admitted the marijuana was hers. Corby says
they had difficulty understanding each other, and that she told them the
bag, not the drugs, belonged to her. There was no CCTV footage of the
inspection.
Corby was arrested and
charged with breaching Indonesia's tough anti-drug trafficking laws. She
was put in jail without bail pending trial.
Her story resonated with
many Australians -- those who had been to Bali, a popular tourist
destination; those who imagined how easily an unlocked bag could allow
drug traffickers to turn a dream holiday into a nightmare; those who
held prejudices about customs officials in developing countries; and
others who thought, regardless of whether Corby was guilty or not, the
penalty she faced was unreasonably harsh.
When Corby was
sentenced, Australia's then-prime minister John Howard said he
understood why Australians felt so strongly about her case.
"The fact that we are a nation whose young travel so much, it is an issue that has touched this country very directly," he said.
Actor Russell Crowe was an example of a high profile voice on the case.
"When there is such
doubt, how can we as a country stand by and let a young lady, as an
Australian, rot away in a foreign prison? That is ridiculous," he said
in an interview with Sydney radio station 2UE.
A fair go?
Much of the outrage surrounding Corby's case centered on whether she had been treated fairly.
Under Indonesian law, Corby had to prove that someone else had placed the drugs in her bag.
Indonesian customs
officials at the airport did not weigh her luggage. In Australia,
Corby's baggage was weighed together with those of her travel
companions, not as separate pieces.
Corby's defense team
asked for fingerprint testing to be carried out on the plastic bag
containing the drugs. Their requests were repeatedly denied.
Her lawyers claimed that
the drugs were planted in Brisbane, by airline baggage handlers
involved in interstate drug trafficking, who planned to remove the
package in Sydney, but mistakenly sent it to Bali instead.
The judges in Corby's trial found her defense team could not prove there was another person responsible for the drugs.
As Chief Judge Linton
Sirait read out the court's verdict, he said Corby had "convincingly
carried out a crime" by importing the drugs illegally.
"The actions of the
accused were a danger to the community," he said. "This was a
transnational crime that could damage the minds of young people."
Is she guilty?
As far as many were
concerned, Corby was your average young, attractive Aussie. An opinion
poll among Australians after she was charged found that more than 90%
believed she was innocent.
Corby, whose father was a
coal miner and mother a fish and chip shop owner, had no previous
criminal convictions and no evidence of involvement with drugs in the
past.
In an interview
with Australian public broadcaster ABC, Corby's father, Mick, said she
didn't use drugs, except for possibly experimenting in high school.
"Oh, she might have
bloody had a puff when she was in bloody Grade 10 or something, round
the back of the schoolyard like kids do, I don't know," he said.
Corby's lawyers relied
on a witness -- a prisoner awaiting trial in Melbourne -- who said he
overheard other inmates talking about a drug smuggling syndicate that
had "lost" a package of marijuana after planting it in luggage at
Brisbane airport in October 2004.
Australian media told
the stories of other tourists who said they'd found marijuana in their
luggage on arrival in Bali years earlier.
One man told Channel
Nine, he found a bag of pot about the size of a loaf of bread in his
luggage. The man said when he phoned the Australian consulate in
Indonesia, they told him "you get caught with that, mate, and you'll be
eating nasi goreng for the rest of your life in jail."
A spokeswoman for the department confirmed that call to a Sydney paper.
Then, just weeks before Corby's trial ended, Australian Federal Police and Qantas, the airline Corby used to fly to Bali, announced
they had been investigating the role of some baggage handlers in a long
running cocaine smuggling operation through Sydney airport.
One alleged incident
took place on the same day Corby traveled. Corby's defense said they
were hopeful of using the evidence in an appeal. However, Qantas said
thorough reviews with police found no evidence of links between Corby's
case and the alleged cocaine trafficking.
Over the years,
questions have been raised about Corby's father. A family member accused
him of involvement in drug dealing. A book went even further. But
Corby's father, who died of cancer in 2008, steadfastly denied any
involvement with drugs.
For a case under the microscope, no detail -- even involving a family member, is too small.
Questions over the integrity of some of Corby's legal team also threatened to damage her case.
When allegations
emerged that one of Corby's legal advisers requested A$500,000 from the
Australian Government in an attempt to bribe Indonesian judges, her
flamboyant lawyer, Hotman Paris Hutapea, appeared on an ABC current
affairs program "The 7.30 Report" to defend himself -- raising other
questions in the process.
"So I'm not Mr Clean, but for this case temporarily I am clean," he said.
"There is no lawyer in
the world is clean (sic) ... If you keep saying Australian lawyer,
American lawyer they are all clean, that's totally bulls--t."
What happens now?
On Friday, Indonesian authorities confirmed Corby had been granted parole.
But she won't be
returning to Australia anytime soon. Corby, now 36, must remain in
Indonesia on parole until 2017, according to local media reports.
It's believed she will
live with her sister Mercedes, who has a home in Kuta -- a popular
tourist area in Bali. According to CNN's Australian affiliate Seven
Network, Corby plans to work in a surf shop owned by Mercedes' husband, where she will design bikinis.
It seems the Corby saga isn't over just yet.
CNN
Posted by Editor
on 11:56.
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