">My Big World Of Crap

I was thinking a few days ago that the Schappelle Corby case had gone quiet lately. It seems the judgement on her appeal to the Bali High Court is due this week. Will she get anywhere this time?

I doubt it myself - haven’t seen anything in media reports on the case since her original conviction that amounts to real evidence. I suspect the result will be a sentence reduction of some sort, like 20 years down to 12 or something like that.

Do I think she’s innocent? I doubt it. The whole saga has been run as a PR campaign as opposed to a legal argument. I think this is to distract attention from the lack of evidence to support her story. I find the whole argument about the drugs being planted in her luggage by airport baggage handlers very hard to swallow - why would someone take the risks of taking a large bag of drugs into a secure area under video surveillance, avoid being monitored, and then having to rely on an accomplice at the other end to intercept the right bag, get the drugs out, avoid surveillance and get it out of the secure area. It’d require a lot of people to be turning a blind eye, being in on it, paid off etc - all this out of a relatively low value transaction (we’re talking tens of thousands, not millions). There are much easier ways to do it - Bris-Syd is a day’s drive with it in the car boot and virtually zero risk, minimal involvement of other people etc.

The best slant I could see on her story is that she was an unwitting carrier for someone she knows, and doesn’t want to give them up (or doesn’t know who did it?).

A couple of other observations on this case:

• the reaction from many Australians on the case was quite disturbing - there are clearly more redneck racists than I would care to think
• why is the Australian taxpayer paying her legal bills? I don’t believe this is the norm and can’t see why it should be. Sure Australians should expect help from the local embassy or consulate, but there is a limit to what we should expect. In this case its populism on the Government’s part - her cause is a popular one and she has much public support, and the Government has elected to jump on the bandwagon.

At the end of the day, regardless of how the legals turn out, I expect she’ll be out of gaol and back home within 5 years. Some sort of deal will end up being done between ours and the Indonesian government.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 25th, 2005 at 4:08 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.