Give the recent media hype about Scapelle Corby, you could be excused for thinking that Australians are strongly against harsh drug sentences handed down by (allegedly) unfair justice systems. Well, you’d be wrong (unless I missed the live television coverage of this Vietnamese drug case).
A 46-year-old Victorian man has been sentenced to death by firing squad in Vietnam for trying to send heroin stuffed in loudspeakers to Australia, a court official says.
Mai Cong Thanh, 46, received the death penalty yesterday, two years after his arrest for having conspired with two other Australian nationals to smuggle heroin from Vietnam to Australia, the Ho Chi Minh City court official said.
One of the two accomplices, Nguyen Manh Cuong, was diagnosed with mental disorder and found incompetent to stand trial.
The other, Lee Benjamin, is believed to have fled to Australia and Vietnamese police have issued a warrant for his arrest.
The three were reported to have compressed two kilograms of heroin into small pieces and hidden them in loudspeakers.
Vietnam has some of the toughest drug laws in the world.
Those in possession of 300 grams of heroin or more than ten kilograms of opium often receive the death penalty.
Several other Australian nationals of Vietnamese origin are on death row but foreigners are rarely executed in the communist country.
In April 2000, a Canadian of Vietnamese origin became the first and only westerner since 1975 to be executed. In July 2003, an Australian woman had her sentence commuted to life imprisonment.
Earlier this month, an Australian man of Vietnamese origin was jailed for 20 years for drug smuggling.
The Vietnam cases come after Australian woman Schapelle Corby received a 20-year-jail term in Indonesia last month for trying to import 4.1 kilograms of marijuana into the resort island of Bali.
The court official said Thanh’s sentence was delivered after a one-day trial.
August 20th, 2005 at 0:30
What a stupid post.
All the people you think we’re ignoring were charged with smuggling heroin - the drug that kills people through overdoses and AIDS and that can cause acute physical addiction from the first ‘hit’.
Schapelle on the other hand was charged with importing marijuana - the recreational drug that is about as dangerous as cigarettes or alcohol, has been tried by a third of Australians and has minimal addictive properties.
So if you know of other Australians at risk of a death sentence for marijuana offences that we are ignoring, I’ll have another think about your argument.
Meanwhile I’ll go on thinking that you’re annoyed because other people are concered about somebody you can’t be bothered to care about and are looking for some reason to disparage the people that do care as an excuse for your own indifference.
Having said that though, I do applaud you for your concern over the heroin smugglers and I look forward to hearing more of your desperate efforts to help them.
August 20th, 2005 at 10:01
Geoff, you won’t find me disagreeing with you on the relative dangers of marijuana compared to heroin (though I will disagree that heroin is addictive from the first hit and that the drug on its own is responsible for deaths from HIV/AIDs), but under Indonesian law they are classified the same way.
Micael Loic Blanc, a French citizen, is serving a life sentence for trafficking in Marijuana hashish, so the sentence given to Schapelle Corby is in line with what could reasonably be expected under Indonesian law.
The reason why I am annoyed is the massive disparity in the media coverage given to Schapelle compared to that given to other Australians sentenced to death for drug trafficking.
You can argue that Schapelle’s sentence is out of proportion to what she might have received for the same crime in Australia, but wouldn’t you then have to argue against the death penalty which doesn’t even exist here?