Schapelle Corby
Schapelle Leigh Corby is an Australian woman who was convicted of smuggling cannabis into Indonesia. She spent nine years imprisoned on the Indonesian island of Bali in Kerobokan Prison. Since her arrest, Corby has publicly maintained that the drugs were planted in her bodyboard bag and that she did not know about them. Her trial and conviction were a major focus of attention for the Australian media.
Corby was convicted on 27 May 2005 for the importation of of cannabis into Bali. She was sentenced to 20 years by the Denpasar District Court and imprisoned in Kerobokan Prison. On appeal, her conviction and sentence were confirmed with finality by the Indonesian Supreme Court. In March 2010, Corby petitioned the President of Indonesia, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, for clemency on the grounds of mental illness. In May 2012, she was granted a five-year sentence reduction. Corby was released on parole on 10 February 2014 after serving nine years in prison. According to her parole conditions, Corby was to leave Bali on 27 May 2017. She was deported on that date and returned to Australia.
Early life
Corby was born in the Gold Coast suburb of Tugun, in the Australian state of Queensland, to Michael Corby and Rosleigh Rose. She is the third of her mother's six children. Her mother's marriage to Corby's father which ended in 1979 when Corby was a baby, also produced a son and another daughter.Upon completing year eleven, she enrolled in a part-time beauty therapy course at a technical and further education institute, finishing two of the four course modules. She then worked in her family's fish and chip shop and at a Coles supermarket.
In the mid-1990s, Corby met a Japanese man, given the pseudonym Kimi Tanaka by the media, who was on a working holiday in Australia and the two began dating. On Tanaka's return to Japan, Corby continued to visit him, and they married in June 1998 in Omaezaki, Shizuoka, Japan. While living in Omaezaki, she worked at a Japanese inn. Her husband also worked in the hospitality industry and as a seasonal worker on nearby tea farms. The couple separated and Corby returned to Australia in July 2000. The couple's divorce was finalised in 2003. Returning home to Australia, Corby had a stopover in Bali, where she had been five times since the age of sixteen, which included stopovers on her way to or from Japan.
Corby's older sister, Mercedes, was previously married to a Balinese man and lives in Bali.
Arrest
On 8 October 2004, Corby, her brother and two friends flew from Brisbane to Bali transiting in Sydney. It was her first visit to Bali in four years, having had several previous stopovers between Australia and Japan to visit her sister, Mercedes.Passing through customs upon her arrival at Ngurah Rai International Airport in Denpasar, Corby was stopped by customs officers and found to have of cannabis in a double plastic vacuum-sealed bag in her unlocked bodyboard bag. Customs officer Gusti Nyoman Winata said that she tried to prevent him from opening the compartment of the bag containing the cannabis. Corby denied this during the trial, saying she originally opened the bag after being asked by Winata whose bag it was. Corby said she and the customs official had difficulty understanding each other. No CCTV footage of this interaction was retrieved or preserved.
Corby stated that she had no knowledge of the drugs until the bodyboard bag was opened by customs officers.
Trial
The prosecution case was based on the customs official's testimony that Corby said the bag was hers, and that it was found to contain 4.2 kg of cannabis. Four customs officials present when her bag was first examined in Bali said she tried to stop the bag being opened, and that she had said "I have some..." This provided a prima facie case for the prosecution.Three of Corby's travelling companions claimed in their testimony that they had seen her pack the bag before leaving for the airport and that only the flippers and yellow bodyboard were inside it. In contrast to the testimony of the customs officials, Corby said that she opened the bag herself at the customs counter.
The Australian Government offered the services of two Queen's Counsel on a pro-bono basis.
Alleged involvement of baggage handlers
Corby's lawyers argued that she had no knowledge of the cannabis until customs officials at the airport found it. Her defence centred on the theory that she had become an unwitting drug courier for what was supposed to have been an interstate shipment of drugs between Brisbane and Sydney in Australia. Her legal defence suggested that airport baggage handlers had put the drugs in Corby's bag, but they could not provide substantive probative evidence of this. According to her lawyers, the cannabis was meant to have been removed in Sydney. These claims were later supported when the former head of operations for the Australian Federal Police's internal investigation unit, Ray Cooper, claimed that it was well known within the AFP that some passengers were unwittingly being used to transfer drugs between domestic airports in Australia. In a June 2008 documentary, Schapelle Corby: The Hidden Truth, Corby's former lawyer, Robin Tampoe, said that he fabricated the defence theory that Australian baggage handlers could have planted the drugs in Corby's luggage and apologised to them, and said that former Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer told him he suspected Corby's brothers were behind the convicted drug smuggler's crime. Tampoe was subsequently struck off for misconduct.According to The Sydney Morning Herald, Corby flew out of Sydney on the same day a large shipment of cocaine was shipped out of the airport by a drug ring involving corrupt baggage handlers. During the week of 9 May 2005, several arrests occurred in Australia related to cocaine smuggling through Sydney airport. Her defence claimed that the cannabis was planted in her bag by mistake by baggage handlers. However, the Australian Federal Police commissioner, Mick Keelty, stated that a key aspect of her defence was not supported by the available intelligence and that the cocaine-smuggling ring which had been discovered involved the reception of shipments of drugs from overseas, not the transportation of drugs domestically.
John Patrick Ford, a prisoner at Port Phillip Prison who was awaiting trial and was subsequently convicted on unrelated charges, was flown to Indonesia to give evidence in Corby's defence.
Ford testified that he overheard a conversation in prison between two men and alleged that one of the men planted the marijuana in Corby's bodyboard bag in Brisbane with the intention of having another person remove it in Sydney. He stated that the drugs were owned by Ron Vigenser, who had been a prisoner at the same jail as Ford. He stated that a mix-up resulted in the marijuana not being removed and subsequently being transported to Indonesia, all without Corby's knowledge. He refused to name the man who he claimed planted the drugs. The prosecution pointed out that his evidence was entirely hearsay and that he was facing trial for several serious offences in Australia. In the Australian media, Vigenser strongly denied any connection with the drugs and reportedly gave a statement to the Australian Federal Police.
A $A1,000,000 reward was offered for information to substantiate claims made by Ford about baggage handlers with no result. Following his return from Bali, Ford was convicted of rape. Subsequently, in prison, he was beaten and stabbed and then held in solitary protective custody. Ford's wife stated that this was a consequence of evidence he gave at Corby's trial.
CCTV cameras at the Bali airport could not corroborate or contradict Corby's account of what happened in customs. The prosecutor said the tapes were not checked. The defence requested to see them. Corby's mother claims that Corby requested the CCTV footage be shown in court, to which the judge replied, "We will use that if we need to". Corby's mother claims the footage was never shown.
The four bags belonging to Corby and her companions were not weighed individually at Brisbane Airport, with a total weight of 65 kg being taken instead. The Bali police and customs did not record the weight of the bags, despite requests from Corby for them to do so. Corby requested that her other luggage be weighed in order to establish if there was an addition of approximately 4.2 kg from the weight checked in and recorded at Brisbane Airport. The weight increase would, according to her defence, have shown that the cannabis had been added after she had checked in her luggage. However, the request was denied.
On 30 June 2011, a woman came forward who had dated a Brisbane Airport baggage handler, a colleague of whom allegedly hid a large bag of marijuana in a traveller's bag in October 2004.
Forensic testing
Tim Lindsay of the University of Melbourne, an expert on Asian law, suggested that a greater focus on the forensic evidence might have helped Corby's case.The bag of cannabis was neither fingerprinted by the Indonesian custom officials or police nor analysed to determine its origin. The cannabis was contained in two bags, and although the outer bag had been handled by customs officers, Corby's defence argued that only the bottom of the inner bag had been contaminated. Therefore, it was claimed that fingerprinting of the inner bag could be of value to the defence if it was shown not to possess Corby's fingerprints. In spite of requests to have the bag tested, including at the time of her arrest, such had not occurred by the time of Corby's second court appearance on 3 February 2005. At that court appearance the bag was handled by court officials. A formal request for fingerprinting made after the court appearance was unsuccessful. The prosecution argued that fingerprinting was unnecessary, as Corby was found with the drugs in her possession.
In 2004, Alexander Downer, the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, announced that the Australian Government would be requesting permission from Indonesia to test the cannabis and help determine its point of origin. It was argued that testing of the cannabis would have strengthened Corby's defence if it could have been shown that the drugs were grown in Indonesia, or potentially weakened it if they were grown in southern Queensland or elsewhere in Australia. However, shortly thereafter the Australian Consul General in Indonesia informed Corby that the AFP had no jurisdiction in the case, and in early 2005 the AFP was advised that the Bali police would not be providing a sample. Downer acknowledged that Indonesia had denied the request, but clarified that as the case was in Indonesia, it was their sovereign right to do so.
Three years later, in 2007, Vasu Rasiah, the "case co-ordinator" for Corby's defence team, appeared on Today Tonight to say that he managed to obtain a sample of the cannabis for testing prior to Corby's conviction, but that Corby did not allow the sample to be tested. This was similar to earlier claims by Mike Keelty, who in 2005 stated that Corby's legal team had advised the AFP that they did not wish to have the drugs tested when it became apparent that the results of the tests would be shared with Indonesia. In both cases these versions of events were disputed by Corby's family, who insisted that it was the Indonesian police who turned down the request, and that they wished to have the drugs examined by Australian authorities.