{"id":3743,"date":"2017-04-29T20:28:42","date_gmt":"2017-04-29T12:28:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gavafox.com\/foxhole\/?p=3743"},"modified":"2017-04-29T20:57:00","modified_gmt":"2017-04-29T12:57:00","slug":"sentence-structure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gavafox.com\/foxhole\/sentence-structure\/","title":{"rendered":"Sentence structure"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mohammed Noh flew to Bali on April 27 last year to celebrate his birthday in style.<\/p>\n

The Singaporean DJ was meeting friends on the island, and they planned to party at Ku De Ta and Potato Head, two upmarket beach clubs where the 33-year-old had previously played gigs.<\/p>\n

Not wanting to risk buying party pills locally, Noh had travelled by road to Johor Bahru in Malaysia the week before and bought 10 ecstasy tabs, which he hid in a jar of Xytol chewing gum.<\/p>\n

He did the same flying to Bali, but immigration officials, noting he had overstayed his visa by a few days on his last trip, took him aside to question if he wasn’t planning on working while here.<\/p>\n

Curious Customs officials joined the fray before going through his bag. One looked into the bottle of gum and spotted a pill.<\/p>\n

“I think you know the feeling when you realize you’re in the shit, deep in the shit, and there is nothing you will be able to do,” he says.<\/p>\n

“There are a million thoughts going around in your mind: how am I going to tell my folks? How am I going to tell my boss? My grandparents … this was going to kill them.”<\/p>\n

There is no question that the pills were only for Noh and his mates for his April 29 party, but officials accused him of being part of a syndicate that was testing the water for bigger drug runs and charged him with trafficking.<\/p>\n

In October last year, he was sentenced to seven years in jail. Seven years for 10 ecstasy pills!<\/p>\n

You frequently hear the expression “do the crime, do the time”, but in Indonesia the legal system is so Byzantine there is simply no way of weighing risk against reward — even if you were a commercial dealer.<\/p>\n

Noah’s sentence is easily the most iniquitous of all those handed down to the foreigners currently in Kerobokan, but there are many equally unfair among the Indonesian inmates.<\/p>\n

Noah’s problems started with his lawyer.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Just say Noh … Singaporean Mohammed Noh after his arrest<\/p><\/div>As in my case, within hours of his arrest, the police pressured him into signing a lawyer so they could speed up proceedings.<\/p>\n

A parade of ambulance chasers presented themselves to him while he was being questioned, boasting of their credentials and contacts.<\/p>\n

It is a dizzying choice in the middle of a crisis and you’re given wildly conflicting advice. Some people suggested I retained the first lawyer the police recommended; He seemed to have the run of the station and had worked on the team that got astonishingly light sentences for an expat cocaine gang a couple of years earlier.<\/p>\n

Others warned against hiring a lawyer who was so at ease with the police on the grounds they were probably working in cahoots with authorities.<\/p>\n

Fortunately for me, the decision was effectively taken out of my hands. My astonishing team of Chris Pedersen, Rob Bradley, Andrew Cockburn and a few others realized that under the circumstances I was probably incapable of making the decision for myself, so they made it for me and engaged Pak Haposan and his team.<\/p>\n

If only Noh had done the same.<\/p>\n

His lawyer turned out to be utterly self-serving, hopelessly unconnected and criminally incompetent.<\/p>\n

He was told that for a fee of around $30,000, the lawyer would get the charges reduced to Article 127 (user) and he would likely end up serving no more than two years.<\/p>\n

That never happened — and when he was finally sentenced the lawyer didn’t even bother showing up in court. <\/p>\n

Noh appealed using a different lawyer, but the damage had been done. In 90 percent of cases, an appeal by the defense results in an increased sentence — judges hate having their decisions questioned — but this time the original verdict was merely upheld.<\/p>\n

He has no other avenue of appeal apart from Presidential Clemency, but only capital cases ever reach his desk.<\/p>\n

Most of the inmates in my block are professional traffickers, but their sentences differ wildly regardless of the similarity of their crimes.<\/p>\n

Two Russians caught separately and days apart with just under a kilo of hashish in their stomachs received sentences of eight and 12 years respectively. An Australian with 1.5 kg of hash plus 200 gms of crystal meth got seven years.<\/p>\n

Look at the cases of Singaporean Desmond Goh and New Zealander Myra Williams, caught days apart at the airport just a week before my arrest.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Goh figure … Desmond Goh got 15 months while Myra Williams got two and a half years<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"Desmond was carrying 0.48 grams of crystal meth and two ecstasy tablets. He was sentenced last month to 15 months in jail.<\/p>\n

Myra was carrying 0.49 grams of meth; she got two and-a-half years.<\/p>\n

I was sentenced to seven months in jail for possession of 10.03 grams of hashish. An Indonesian in the block next door was sentenced on Tuesday to five and-a-half-years for 5 grams.<\/p>\n

The reason for the difference in all these cases is, of course, money. I guess the only non-incriminating way of saying it is: “you get the legal defense you pay for”.<\/p>\n

That was the answer I gave ABC’s Four Corners in an interview last week for a documentary they’re making on “A Day in The Life of Kerobokan”.<\/p>\n

They’ve been given unprecedented access to the prison — I think they’ve been pretty shocked at how freely they’ve been able to roam — but they’ll still get a somewhat sanitized version of what life here is really like.<\/p>\n

I don’t think I’ve had to flat-out lie in any of the interviews I’ve given them, but I’ve obviously sinned by omission.<\/p>\n

When asked about drugs, for example, I replied that the Kerobokan was not unlike prisons elsewhere in the world and that even in Australia the authorities regularly reported that drugs were the biggest problem.<\/p>\n

When asked about corruption, instead of saying the guards were all on the take I replied that the government had readily acknowledged graft existed across all government institutions and were making efforts to stamp it out — and the prison system was no different.<\/p>\n

Everyone hid their phones and there were no drugs in sight, but I think the TV team otherwise got a pretty accurate picture of what life is like in here.<\/p>\n

Of course there is an element of “apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play”, but I’ll be interested in seeing the show when it comes out in a few weeks.<\/p>\n

But back to the disparity in sentences.<\/p>\n

Two Malaysians were caught at the airport in October with a veritable pharmacopeia — 70 grams of marijuana, 3 grams of meth, 15 ecstasy tablets and 105 Erimin pills. They were planning one hell of a bender.<\/p>\n

Aliff Azhar, 22, an engineering student at university, had the weed hidden in his socks, while the rest of the drugs were in luggage belonging to Mohammed Shahzadi, 36, a sports instructor.<\/p>\n

Aliff comes from a wealthy family and at pre-sentencing next week is expecting to get a prosecution recommendation of two years. He is hoping for a final sentence of 12 months.<\/p>\n

Mohammed has fewer resources and therefore different legal recourse. He expects prosecutors to demand seven years and hopes for a sentence of five.<\/p>\n

Partners in crime, but certainly not partners in time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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