“Bring in the next prisoner and let us gaze upon his rascally face, and let him not waste the time of this court by pleading him innocent.”
Judge Jeffreys -  the Bloody Assizes, 1685

In the Schapelle Corby case, a parallel could well be drawn between the Indonesian Court hearing and that of the Bloody Assizes. In 1685, a very rabid Protestant judge sentenced 320 prisoners to death and many more to slavery in the West Indies after the disastrous battle of Sedgemoor, where a peasant rabble under the leadership of the Duke of Monmouth were defeated. Anyone accused of being a Catholic or sympathiser was assumed to be guilty in the eyes of this judge and therefore automatically merited the death sentence.

In Indonesia, a person is assumed to be guilty until they can prove themselves innocent, and in the case of drug smuggling, the sentence is usually death. The Judge in this matter, has appeared on television where he has stated that he has personally judged over 800 such cases, and not a single one of them has been found Not Guilty! This means in effect, that this one man has already sentenced something like 800 people to death. This far exceeds the efforts of Judge Jeffreys, and he has gone down in history as one of the most notorious judges of all time.

Regardless of the facts in the Schapelle Corby case, any judge with a record like that in virtually any other country in the world would have had his career investigated long before it got to that stage. It could be argued that this judge is more concerned with preserving his 100% record than he is with the facts of the case. The likelihood of not one of the defendants in that number being innocent, defies logic. This would suggest that there is either a strong political pressure on the judiciary to find these accused guilty, or the judge has a personal reason for so doing. In either case, it cannot bode well for Schapelle.

Barnaby Drake

Asians? What would they know about running a proper justice system? Any court that doesn’t take seriously the testimony of the cheap talk that a pretty criminal happened to overhear in prison is seriously just not up to scratch.

Imagine it the other way round, if some Indonesian citizen happened to be found with three kilos of gunga in his/her suticase, and the same kind of witness who happened to overhear something in an Indonesian jail turned up for the defence: the case would be over in minutes. Things would run so smoothly there wouldn’t even been time for a good ol’ media beat up. Too bad other Australian citizens convicted for drug trafficking in South East Asia, such as Le My Linh and Tran Van Thanh, were not somehow deemed worthy enough for the same media attention.

If Corby is only guilty of failing to lock her bag then the national wave of sympathy and support is well justified because it is not a crime to be trusting.

We have both the old parties acting on Corby’s behalf writing letters to the Indonesion government and now a report that the government will supply legal support if requested.

Whilst I can understand the government acting to assist an Australian through an appeal against the imposition of a death penalty in another country, the idea is as abhorrent to Australians as torture.

However, Corby only got 20 years from a Judge who has never found anyone not guilty, possibly a phenomenon of the Indonesian system of justice or a reflection on the clientele. The 20 years may say something about the attention give the case, the decision triggering a review of the judgment through an automatic appeal.

What do they know in Canberra about the content of the body bag that could not be told in the Indonesian court or is it the popular appeal of a young white woman in distress that is riveting the attention of several political leaders?.

As I understand it we have a 14 year old Australian sentenced to death in Vietnam and hardly a peep from Howard, aren’t the votes among this community important.

Indeed why have we not heard loudly from the child protection organizations, this must be a high for child abuse, even if it is state sanctioned.

Perhaps the government is acting on her behalf and it is the focus of the fourth estate, deciding on what will be popular in our homes by covering Corby, has skewed coverage of the troubles of Aussies as they are drawn into the machinations of the drug trade.

Whatever, it appears to be a poor reflection on our values that a 27 year old is presumed innocent whilst a 14 year old is accepted as guilty.

My understanding is that her 12 year old sister only got life.

phill Parsons

Barnaby Drake:

Just because a system presumes that a person is guilty until they can prove themselves innocent, doesn’t mean it’s a flawed system. Many other systems work fine under this style (ie. France).

The system is only as good as the people who run it. Sure there are a crooks posing as judges in Indonesia, but before you can judge them as such, consider them relative to the rest of the lot.

Do you honestly think that an Indonesian in corby’s circumstance, with the same type of witness for the defence, would have any better prospect of being found not guilty?

The populist Austalian response to the Corby case once again exposes the boorish, arrogant and duplicitous nature underpinning so many Australian citizens - a charatceristic that has been once again picked up by their authoritative conservative government always eager to exploit the peoples prejudice.

Was Habib’s problem his name - his gender ? Australia gave millions to the Asian tsunami appeals yet turns away from hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths and from the first Australians. Yet Australians seem a friendly kind people — until you scratch the surface to reveal the corrosive scars of their obsession with Howard’s blind conservatism.

The Schapelle Corby case still generates more questions than answers.

The prosecution wishes to appeal the sentence and wants to impose either Life or Death. As the prosecution is not an independent entity, this decision to appeal cannot be without the Indonesian Attorney General’s approval, and ipso facto, the Government.  If this is permitted, this does not say very much for Australian/Indonesian relationships. Perhaps such things as West Timor still rankles and other diplomatic sorties into the affairs of their country.

The judge’s statement that ‘I am responsible to God for my verdict, not the people’, shows the lack of democratic principles and a stronger affinity to Islamic idealism. Westerners particularly, are seen as infidels, and Christianity as an enemy.  More so since the recent intrusions of the Americans and their ideals on the State of Islam.

This would explain the disparity of sentence between that of the cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, someone who was actively engaged in fighting for the Islamic fundamentalist ideal, and a white Christian foreigner. They are tolerated as tourists who bring financial benefit to the country, and as trading partners, but not on religious grounds or as equals.

There also appears to be a certain amount of gloating over the ‘Guilty’ verdict, by both the prosecutors and the Judge, and the later claiming that he ‘slept well’ after the verdict. This again fortifies the above points.

There is no way in which this trial could be impartial with so many factors in the background. Regardless of evidence, poor Schapelle is nothing more than a political pawn in this situation, and suffered the inevitable verdict. Now they want to press the point home. It has very little to do with drug smuggling.

Barnaby Drake

Mmmm.  Interesting comments above.

But can someone please explain why there is now yet another Government body attempting to cover up corruption among baggage handlers at airports?

What is going on? First it was Mick Keelty head of the Federal Police acting like Constable Clod until embarrassed into the open.  Now it’s Customs Officials who hid a report for six months, all the time that Schapelle Corby has been in gaol.  Thank God for The Australian newspaper for blowing this into the public arena.

I fear that regardless of gender, bust size, eye-colour, race, all the things that appear to fascinate those above me, there is something far greater to be concerned about here.

Someone, well a whole bunch of someones, is trying to hide something from the people of Australia.  People in authority, people in positions of trust.  Inadvertantly, Schapelle Corby has blown the top off something huge.  And Australians, bless their little woollen socks, are a wake up to it.  That might just be the reason that people are so furious about this - nothing to do with race, bust size or eye-colour at all.

If you worked where I work you’ll know that everday there is someone in public office trying to keep a secret from the public.  On the issue of security at airports the game is up. The Government has been busted.

Nudger