The soap opera surrounding this poor woman has reopened with the first day in court of her sister (Mercedes Corby) who is claiming she was defamed by a program aired by the ‘Seven Network’ here in Australia.
The network aired a series of programmes in which a ‘friend’ called Jody did a ‘tell all expose’ on Jody and her supposed links with drug dealing etc.
I’m not going into the entire proceedings which descended into farce within minutes after an onlooker began yelling inside the court, but the evidence so far has been quite enlightening… if you’re interested in that side of the case.
Trouble is that no matter what happens in court none of this will help bring Schapelle back to Australia! She is stuck in Bali in a hell-hole of a prison with no prospect of getting out in the next 20 years.
There’ll be more on this later no doubt, but the best that can be said of the case so far is that while it presents an unedifying picture of life at the Corby household… it doesn’t mean Mercedes wasn’t defamed… or more importantly that Schapelle had anything to do with the drugs that were found in her ‘boogie-board case’.
The Eclectic Interweb 
Corby has served more than three years already and with remission she faces around another 12 years, not 20. Her mistake was being born into that ‘orrible family.
All of us have our suspicions about what actually happened between the time she slipped the boogie board into its cover and the customs desk at Bali… but in the end it needs the real culprit to come forward and declare himself before the ‘truth’ would be known.
The only person who really knows what happened is the one who put the stuff in her bag. For me her reactions were too real to be faked… if you follow me… so despite all the rumour and innuendo that’s been bandied about, I still don’t think she did it.
Her family might well be ‘sticking with her’, but we still have to ask who it was who *really* put her in prison.
Had I been Schapelle, I would have got the firing squad before there’d even been a trial. That’s if the press and public formed a judgement that I must be guilty on the basis of my family.Some of my rellies make the Corbys look like the Brady Bunch.
Even the AFP recently admitted they could not find any proof that Schapelle was rver a member of a drug syndicate.
But hey, try telling that to “Joe Public”. The billious comments on news blogs about her make me bilious myself almost. Especially people bragging that they always “knew” Schapelle was guilty and weren’t sucked in when the “biased” press gave her sympathetic coverage blah blah blah.
These same people can’t or prefer not to see that they are being manipulated and sucked in by the same press, simply one with an unsympathetic bias. (Ie,if her siblings were indeed drug dealers, Schapelle must be too. End of story. She’s guilty. Such simplistic cr@ppola.)
Okay, pardon the tangent!
No tangent – it’s the fundamental problem with the public attitude over here. From the overkill of media support when she was arrested to the continuous and insidious hacking at the family reputation ever since makes her ‘guilty by association’. The result has been a collapse in her public support base.
Without that ongoing public support there will be no efforts made by our government to have the verdict overturned… or even a Presidential Pardon sought on her behalf.
Maybe less media attention at the outset would have allowed the Indonesian justice system to have made some allowances… but once the world spotlight was trained on them so minutely there was little they could have done *but* find her guilty just to prove they weren’t as corrupt as the media (and her flamboyant lawyer) kept implying.
Having said that, from the outside it *does* appear there was overwhelming evidence for her guilt, but closer examination shows a series of flaws and errors that in any other country would have resulted in an acquittal if only because of the ‘benefit of the doubt’.
I also agree that Schapelle is innocent. I’ve always said this, even after ‘the tide turned’. Hopefully karma will kick in at some stage and let her live her life in peace. I wish her good luck and good fortune for the remainder of her life.