Australian drug smuggler Scott Rush Spared Death Penalty in Indonesia: Lawyer

'Bali 9' Scott Rush

Australian drug smuggler Scott Rush, one of a gang known as the Bali Nine, has won an appeal against his death sentence in Indonesia, his lawyer said on Tuesday.

“His judicial review has been accepted by the Supreme Court. His death penalty has been annulled and the sentence has been changed to life,” Frans Hendra Winata said.

“The reason is because he is still young, he expressed remorse and he has never been convicted of any other crime. And most especially, he was just a courier and not the mastermind.”

The 24-year-old was convicted and ultimately sentenced to death for his role in an attempt to smuggle some eight kilograms of heroin into Australia from the Indonesian resort island of Bali in 2005.

The two alleged ringleaders of the Bali Nine gang, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, are also seeking to have their death sentences reduced to life.

A spokesman for the Indonesian Supreme Court was unable to confirm that Rush’s appeal had been successful.

“I don’t know yet about that,” spokesman Djoko Sarwoko said.

Source: Agence France-Presse, May 10, 2011

Bali Nine member Scott Rush 'spared execution' in Indonesia

Scott Rush (center)

Rush, 24, had been facing execution for his part in a 2005 plot to smuggle more than eight kilograms of heroin from Bali to Australia.

But the Indonesian Supreme Court, which published the decision today, instead commuted his sentence to life, citing the fact that Rush had shown remorse for his actions while also taking into account his age.

His father Lee Rush said the family would continue fighting to free their son.

"It's a great relief, it's been a long time coming," he told reporters in Bali.

"The sentence was far too harsh from the beginning for the crime that he committed.

"We had hoped we could get a lighter sentence.

"We must continue to get Scott and the other Australians back home where they belong."

The court also cited the fact that he was only a courier, and not considered a ringleader of the group.

Rush, from Brisbane, was only 19 and on his first trip to Bali when he was arrested at Ngurah Rai Airport with 1.3kg of heroin strapped to his legs underneath his clothing.

The so-called ringleaders of the Bali Nine - Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran - are also waiting for the outcome of judicial reviews in the hope they will escape the firing squad.

If their appeals fail, they must also rely on President Yudhoyono granting them clemency.

Rush now joins a number of other members of the drug smuggling plot who are also serving life sentences in Bali's Kerobokan Prison, including Martin Stephens, Matthew Norman, Si Yi Chen, Tan Duc Than Nguyen and Michael Czugaj.

Stephens had his final appeal against a life sentence rejected in January.

The final member of the drug ring, Renae Lawrence, is serving a 20-year sentence, which has already been reduced by almost two years.

Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd said Australians would greet the decision with relief.

"The Australian Government welcomes this decision by the Supreme Court," he told Parliament.

The Federal Government remains in close touch with Rush's parents, who had been informed of the decision.

Mr Rudd said Rush's parents had shouldered a heavy burden, with years of waiting for the decision.

Opposition foreign affairs spokeswoman Julie Bishop said Rush was a young man, aged 19, when he was caught trafficking drugs and had a somewhat troubled past.

If there was ever a lesson for people to understand they must abide by the laws of other countries, Rush's was one, she said.

"This young man has learned a very, very harsh lesson," Ms Bishop told Parliament.

Source: Herald Sun, May 10, 2011


Scott Rush told life sentence is final

Bali Nine drug mule Scott Rush has been told the decision to commute his death sentence to life in prison is final.

Rush's Bali-based lawyer, Robert Khuana, said he had asked prison authorities to pass on the news to Rush that Indonesia's Supreme Court had granted his final appeal, sparing him from execution.

"I have asked the prison officers to tell Scott of the decision," Mr Khuana told AAP on Wednesday.

However, Mr Khuana wanted Rush to know the decision was final.

Mr Khuana will visit Rush in person at Kerobokan Prison on Thursday to discuss the decision in more detail.

Rush, 25, from Brisbane, had been facing the death penalty for his part in a 2005 plot to smuggle more than eight kilograms of heroin from Bali into Australia.

However, the Supreme Court on Tuesday revealed it had granted his final appeal, known as judicial review, and had commuted his sentence to life in prison.

While the result was not as good as the 15 years sought by Rush's lawyers, the decision did bring relief to his family, with his father Lee Rush saying it had been: "A long time coming."

It also comes after an earlier appeal delivered a much more shocking result.

Rush, the youngest of nine Australians convicted over the drug-smuggling conspiracy, was given life in prison when initially convicted, but had his sentence increased to death at his first appeal.

The panel of judges that presided over that decision were the same three that reversed it on Tuesday, sparing Rush's life.

While the written decision is not yet available in full, it is understood the decision was 2-1 in favour of reducing his sentence, with the judges citing the fact that Rush had shown remorse for his actions, and was only a minor player in the drug-smuggling plot.

His age was also taken into account.

Rush was only 19, and on his first overseas trip, when he was arrested at Ngurah Rai Airport with 1.3kg of heroin strapped to his legs and body underneath his clothing.

Rush's supporters expressed relief on Wednesday, however like Lee Rush they had been hoping for a lighter sentence.

Father Tim Harris, the family's former parish priest, said the decision to spare Rush's life was wonderful but also heartbreaking.

"It's sort of bittersweet, isn't it, where there's great news about Scott's situation on the one hand but ongoing pain continues by virtue of the fact that Scott continues to serve a life sentence." he told the ABC.

But the reaction from the man who tipped off the Australian Federal Police (AFP) about the Bali Nine plot showed there remains anger towards the role Australian authorities played in the saga.

Family friend and barrister Bob Myers tipped off the AFP weeks before the Bali Nine were arrested in Indonesia, in a bid to stop the smugglers before they committed the crimes.

He said the government was doing all it could to "right the wrong" of the past but he could not forgive the federal police for their role in the incident.

"These nine young Australians all faced the death penalty because of the actions of the federal police," Mr Myers told ABC radio on Wednesday.

"It was the federal police that really had these nine people incarcerated in the first place, so I'll never forgive them for that."

It is believed the Supreme Court carefully considered the testimony of former AFP commissioner Mick Keelty in deciding to grant Rush's judicial appeal.

Mr Keelty, who was also a lead player in the AFP investigation that led to the Bali Nine arrests, told the Supreme Court at Rush's final appeal that he was the lowest ranking among the members of the syndicate.

Source: AAP, May 11, 2011
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Hamas executes Palestinian for Israeli collaboration

Gaza's Islamist-run government executed a man convicted of collaborating with Israel on Wednesday, the Hamas interior ministry said, openly defying the Palestinian president just hours ahead of a reconciliation move.

The man was executed by firing squad after being sentenced to death last month for helping "the Israeli occupation", the ministry said, referring to him only by his initials A.S..

The execution came on the same day that the leaders of Hamas ratified a deal with western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to end a Palestinian schism that has left Hamas in sole control of the Gaza Strip.

Israel withdrew from the enclave in 2005 but maintains a blockade against Hamas, which refuses to recognise the Jewish state or renounce violence.

Under Palestinian law, executions should be carried out only with presidential approval, but Hamas ignored this.

It was not clear if the execution had been rushed through ahead of the unity ceremony in Egypt or whether Hamas would in future seek Abbas's approval to apply the death penalty.

Hamas executed 5 Palestinians last year, including 2 men also convicted of collaborating with Israel.

A Palestinian human rights group named the executed man as Abdel-Karim Shrair, 37, and said he had been a member of the local police force when it was dominated by Abbas's Fatah group.

"The Independent Commission for Human Rights condemns the execution by the Palestinian government in Gaza of the death penalty against a citizen this morning," the group said.

"It reaffirms that ratification of death penalties is an exclusive right of the president of the Palestinian Authority."

Hamas defeated Fatah in a brief civil war in 2007, establishing its own security force in the coastal enclave and leaving Abbas's group in control of just the West Bank, still under Israeli occupation.

Abbas has refrained from approving death sentences against Palestinians convicted of capital offences in the West Bank.

Source: Reuters, May 4, 2011

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Call for firing squads as UK bans lethal-drug exports

BRITISH efforts to halt the sale of lethal-injection drugs to the US have been seized on by American death-penalty supporters.

They are calling for the method to be scrapped in favour of firing squads or a return to the gas chamber.

Within hours of a British export ban on sodium thiopental and other drugs coming into force on Friday, a leading death-penalty advocate in California said that a modernised gas chamber was "the obvious solution" to a backlog of more than 700 death-row inmates whose fate depended on state approval of a new method of execution.

In New York, a prominent law professor who favours execution as "retributive" justice called for a return to the widespread use of firing squads as a form of capital punishment that "doesn't pretend to be something else".

International pressure on suppliers of the three drugs most commonly used for lethal injections over the past three decades -- sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride -- has led to a shortage of the drugs in the US and an urgent push by state governments for alternatives.

Only two states have switched to a new drug protocol, leaving 32 others using up supplies or in transition to a new regime, while nearly 3000 death-row cases nationwide languish in legal limbo.

In California, the future of the death penalty will be decided by a judge, who must rule on the legality of a new drug cocktail in which a barbiturate often used for putting down animals could be substituted for sodium thiopental.

However, as judge Jeremy Fogel deliberates, Kent Scheidegger, of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, has offered an alternative: a modernised gas chamber in which cyanide gas is replaced with a neutral gas such as helium.

The effect on a prisoner would be similar to that of hypoxia on a pilot suffering oxygen deprivation at high altitude, Mr Scheidegger said. "It feels like nothing. You just feel kind of woozy," he added. "For anyone thinking longer-term about alternatives to lethal injection, this is the obvious solution."

He blamed a failure to think seriously about a modernised gas chamber on bureaucratic inertia. The method is widely seen as unacceptable because of its echoes of the Holocaust, but Mr Scheidegger wrote recently: "We used the gas chamber when World War II was still fresh in people's minds, and gas as such was not a problem then. It should be less of a problem as that era fades from history."

New York Law School professor Robert Blecker said lethal injection should be abandoned -- not for practical reasons, but because it sanitised a process that should hurt. "It conflates medicine with punishment," he said. "How we kill those we detest should in no way resemble how we kill those we love.

"Firing squad is my preferred method," he said.

Source: The Australian, April 21, 2011 (local time)

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Dubai firing squad executes mosque slayer

The father of a boy murdered in a Dubai mosque says the convicted killer has been put to death by a firing squad. It's the 1st execution in the United Arab Emirates in 3 years.

Mukhthiar Ahmed Khudabakhsh, the father of the 4-year-old victim, says the sentence was carried out on Thursday at a shooting range in Dubai.

The boy's parents were among 5 family members present for the execution of Rashid Rabee al-Rashidi, a 30-year-old boat captain convicted of raping and killing the boy Moosa in a mosque bathroom in November 2009.

The UAE's last execution was in February 2008.

Source: Associated Press, Feb. 10, 2011

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Indonesia: Judges' comments raise hopes for Bali Nine duo

The Indonesian court that heard the final legal appeals of death row inmates Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran (left) has raised the Bali 9 members' chances of being spared death by firing squad.

A written declaration that the right to life ''must not be ignored, reduced [or] taken away by anyone'' made by a panel of 3 judges was sent from Denpasar District Court to the country's Supreme Court last month.

Based on that opinion, and the evidence of the hearings summarised by the judges, the Supreme Court will make the final verdict on the Bali nine members' attempt to have the death penalty reduced to 20-year prison terms. The decision is expected within a few months.

The six-point concluding opinion, obtained by The Age, backs most of the arguments put to the court by the pair's legal counsel and notes that many other countries no longer have the death penalty.

''Human rights constitute the most basic of rights inherent to man and is universal and eternal. Therefore, it must be protected, defended and must not be ignored, reduced [or] taken away by anyone,'' the judges said.

They pointed to the 1945 constitution, which they said explicitly stated that everybody had the right to life.

While capital punishment still exists in Indonesia, including for narcotics offences, the judges said the death penalty should only be imposed for ''the most serious crimes'' under the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights signed by the Indonesian government.

Chan and Sukumaran, both from Sydney, were detained along with 7 other Australians in Bali in 2005, and later found guilty of organising the smuggling of 8.1 kilograms of heroin to Australia.

Unlike other members of the Bali nine syndicate, they have faced the death penalty from the outset and have had that sentence upheld in all previous appeals, hurt by their refusal to admit their guilt or co-operate with authorities on the advice of their previous legal team.

However, the two men confessed their crimes before the judges in their most recent trial, expressing their contrition in Indonesian courts and testifying that they were working hard to reform their lives.

Their rehabilitation was endorsed by testimony from the governor of Bali's Kerobokan prison, Siswanto, who praised them for organising computer, graphic design and other classes for Indonesian inmates at the penitentiary. Siswanto also expressed his desire that their lives be spared.

The judges picked up on this point, saying the ''condition of the perpetrator'' must be considered.

However, the Denpasar judges dismissed an argument from the duo's lawyer that they only ''attempted'' the crime of drug exportation because the drugs were intercepted at Bali airport before the drug mules boarded their plane back to Australia.

Just what weight the Supreme Court gives to the Denpasar judges' opinion remains to be seen. The court is also considering an appeal from Scott Rush, the other member of the Bali 9 on death row.

If the appeals fail, the 3 Australians can appeal directly to Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono for clemency.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has lobbied Dr Yudhoyono on behalf of Chan, Sukumaran and Rush.

Source: The Age, January 31, 2011

Right-to-life ruling may save Bali pair from firing squad

The chances of the Bali nine ringleaders Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran being spared death by firing squad have improved significantly after the Indonesian court that heard their final legal appeals found the right to life ''must not be ignored, reduced or taken away''.

The striking declaration in support of the sanctity of life was made by a panel of three judges in a written opinion sent from Denpasar District Court last month to the Supreme Court.

Based on the opinion and evidence summarised by the judges, the Supreme Court will make the final verdict on the men's bid to have the death penalty reduced to a 20-year jail term.

The decision is expected in months.

The 6-point concluding opinion, obtained by the Herald, backs most of the arguments put by the pair's lawyer and notes that many other countries no longer have the death penalty. ''Human rights constitute the most basic of rights inherent to man and is universal and eternal. Therefore, it must be protected, defended and must not be ignored, reduced, taken away by anyone.''

While capital punishment still exists in Indonesia, the judges said such a penalty should be imposed only for ''the most serious crimes'' under the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights signed by Indonesia.

Chan and Sukumaran, both from Sydney, were detained with 7 other Australians in Bali in 2005 and later found guilty of organising to smuggle 8.1 kilograms of heroin to Australia.

Unlike other syndicate members, the pair have faced the death penalty from the outset and have had that sentence upheld in all previous appeals, hurt by their refusal to admit guilt.

However, the 2 confessed their crimes before the judges in the most recent hearing. Their rehabilitation was endorsed by the governor of Bali's Kerobokan prison, Siswanto, who said he wanted their lives spared.

The judges dismissed an argument from their lawyer that they only ''attempted'' the crime of drug exportation because the drugs were intercepted at Bali airport before the drug couriers boarded their plane to Australia.

If the appeal fails, the Australians can appeal to Indonesia's President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, for clemency.

Source: Sydney Morning Herald, January 31, 2011

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