Tuesday, May 31, 2005
The story behind the story of Our Schapelle

Australia is in shock. No, their cricket team has not lost to England; one of its citizens has been convicted of drug smuggling in Indonesia.

Schapelle Corby, from the Gold Coast, was arrested after 4½ kilos of marijuana were found in her boogie-board bag on entrance into Bali for a holiday. Last week she was convicted of 20 year in gaol and a $13,000 fine.

At face value, her defence seemed flimsy and based on the assertion that she didn’t do it, smugglers from within the baggage handling ranks at Sydney airport did it. 4½ kilos of cannabis seems on odd shipment for a major drug smuggling ring – and does seem to point to a small amount smuggled in for personal and peer consumption, whilst on holiday. It is said that the Australian product is of superior quality and is commonly traded between holiday-makers due to the prevalence of entrapment as a process of crime fighting on Bali. This was not Schapelle’s first trip to Bali either. She has made several since her sister married a Balinese man.

Conversely, the prosecution seems just as flimsy. It is based on the assertion that she did do it; she was found with it in her bag and she seemed nervous at the airport.

It seems either side was unable to come up with any forensic or justifiable proof. If the defence believed that simply demonstrating doubt over the prosecution’s case was enough, they were sadly mistaken.

But it is not as though the judge did not allow sufficient evidence before the court. Most commentators agree that a fair degree of latitude in the evidence presented was given.

Her lawyers are now preparing the appeal and the Australian government has quietly allowed two ‘top’ QCs to be engaged at the taxpayers’ expense.

The case has highlighted distinctions in jurisprudence between the Australian combative cross-examination and of innocence until proven guilty and the Indonesian system of criminal inquiry. In the West (and Australia) we base our criminal law on Voltaire’s statement: "It is better to risk sparing a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one".

Voltaire did not influence Indonesian justice, apart from perhaps negatively through association with the Dutch colonial authorities. Throughout SE Asia, and in particular when it comes to smuggling narcotics, a far more punitive regime is in place. If Corby had been arrested in Malaysia, she would not have been facing prison, but the firing squad.

The Australian government has been studiously quiet on the issues – particularly since the prosecutor declared that he would not be seeking the death penalty. Canberra is keen to maintain comfortable relations with its bigger, more volatile northern neighbour. One government interfering with the process of justice of another has long been seen as a big no-no in diplomatic circles – and for good reason, especially where there has at least been a process of justice, of sorts.

That said, it is patently clear that the same process of justice, as in say, an Australian Court, has not been upheld. A number of discrepancies have been highlighted including:

• the disappearance of the day’s security tapes from the baggage handling areas at Sydney; and
• the inability of the defence team to obtain fingerprint samples from the bag.

Hammering another country’s system of justice has become a national pastime in Western countries – despite a fairly shocking regression in human rights violation in the USA, UK and Australia since they all signed up to the war against terror and Iraq.

The reaction in the Australian media has been typical of what I have come to expect from a nation that is dedicated to the plight of Australians overseas, whether they be sporting heroes, soldiers running mercy missions or alleged drug smugglers.

The first thing to happen is the story’s protagonist loses her surname, then they gain a prefix: so, ‘Our Schapelle’.

The Courier-Mail turned over the first 10 pages on Saturday to Our Schapelle’s story, using most of it to moralise on the injustice that has occurred, how it has affected her sister’s Mercedes, sorry, her sister, Mercedes and ensuring that the national hysteria can be maintained to help sales. Then, in a volte-face, it uses its lead editorial and a small op-ed piece to call for national temperance and to hope that the appeal is successful.

Channel 7 – a sort of TV version of the Daily Mail, except just a little more fear-mongering – ran a number of programmes last week, prior to the verdict. One show forensically examined the evidence presented to the Bali Court over the last thee months, but so as not to bore the audience, it was done in under two hours. Surprise, surprise, the telephone poll conducted after the show found that overwhelming, Channel 7 viewers thought that Our Schapelle was innocent.

I doubt such TV shows made any material difference to to the outcome of the trial but they do fuel resentment of innocent parties and reinforce stereotypes of 'civiclised' and 'primitive' socities.

Channel 7 was also one of the two networks to screen the verdict, live and uninterrupted, apart from, of course, by adverts. This was true reality TV. If we had this drama to look forward to every day, we could finally see the back of Big Brother. Rival Channel 9, who had the Corby family under contract for exclusive access also screen the verdict, but seemingly failed to provide an Indonesian interpreter with sufficient capability to translate the judges verdict.

The rest of the media, Sydney Morning Herald apart, is keeping the faith somewhere between the Courier-Mail and Channel 7. Even Triple-M, a commercial music radio station, has surrupticously begun broadcasting phone-in feedback for listeners to sound off and turn a music station into the best type of reactionary talk-radio stations a la John Laws.

The Corby trial and verdict had been great product to squeeze into the news-hole and in between TV ads. Whipping up public hysteria at home is a great way to ensure that the investment in keeping a journalist in Bali for three months pays off.

Bad sadly, a depressing side effect to this induced hysteria is the crassest sort of racism that precipitates out of the public’s outrage at a single Indonesian judge. Letters to the Editor are beginning to ask whether Australians would be quite so generous if another tsunami devastated a part of Indonesia. Some are asking for the money they donated to be given back in a sort of charity ‘money back guarantee’. Consumer groups are asking Australians whether they should consider spending their tourist dollars somewhere else. Hum, that’ll work – collective punishment for the Indonesian people for the differences in the judicial standards.

But corruption in Indonesian judicial system remains widespread. It is suggested that had Corby’s lawyers had had the aforesight to bribe the judge, she could well be back in Surfers Paradise already. This is probably overstating it – the presiding judge was one the island’s most high-profile judges, who had previously sentanced to death three men convicted of the Bali Bomb. But frightenly, this judge is proud of his previously unblemished record of adjudicating criminal cases – in over 5,000 trials he has not delivered one innocent verdict.

An objective opinion is difficult to find. The media outlets who have the Corbys under contract are quite happy to drip feed their customers with banal sentiments creamed from the Corby family, while the media channels denied that direct access are quite prepared to put out negative stories about the trouble Our Schapelle’s Dad had with hashish over 30 years ago.

All this gives the trail and verdict a feeling of unreality. While it must be very real for Our Schapelle, facing twenty years in gaol, the rest of us become at once removed from the issue as the story becomes the story about the case. Schapelle becomes just a celebrity on anther reality TV show. All we must do now, is pick up the phone, dial a premium rate line and vote for her eviction.

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