Drug War Issues
Politics & Advocacy
A Malaysian court has sentenced a Thai woman to death for trafficking 1.04 kilograms of marijuana. Under the country's draconian Dangerous Drugs Act of 1952, any drug trafficking offense garners a mandatory death sentence.
The ruling came Wednesday at the High Court in Kota Baru. Judge Datuk Muhamad Ideres Muhamad Rapee ordered the sentence after the prosecution managed to prove a prima facie against Roseedah Cheubong, 41, who was crying as the sentence was issued.
The court ignored the pleas of Roseedah's attorney, Zamri Mat Nawang, who told it she was a single mother trying to fend for herself and her teenage child and that she was sorry for what she had done. Instead, it listened to deputy prosecutors Wan Abad Razak Wan Hussin, who called for the mandated penalty because of the "gravity" of the offense.
Roseedah has been jailed since she was arrested in February 2004 for selling a kilogram of weed outside a gas station. No word yet on possible appeals.
The provincial High Court sentence came little more than a week after the Malaysian Federal Court upheld the death sentence of a taxi driver for trafficking less than two kilos of marijuana. According to the anti-death penalty organization Hands Off Cain, so far this year, Malaysian courts have imposed the death sentence 12 times. Only two death sentences were for murder. The other 10 were for drug trafficking, and eight of those were for trafficking marijuana.
Human rights and harm reduction groups have organized an international campaign to end the death penalty for drug offenses. Read about it here. Since Malaysia does not make a habit of publicly announcing executions, it is unclear how many of the marijuana traffickers sentenced to death have actually been executed.
Permission to Reprint: This content is licensed under a modified Creative Commons Attribution license. Content of a purely educational nature in Drug War Chronicle appear courtesy of DRCNet Foundation, unless otherwise noted.
Comments
The Fuck Up = Tobackgo
I haven't looked it up yet, but Pakistan gets 10% of all its government revenues from cigarette taxes and I think Malaysia is one of several nearby countries which are similar. Consider how much clout Big 2Wackgo has in the US with a smaller percentage, and the same oligopoly corporations get away with Murder even worse in the orient than here.
Frontal attack on the tax bribe issue: in self defense, pro-cannabis activists should push for worldwide replacement of the $$ hot burning overdose genocide cigarette with E-Cigarette and Vaporizer (or if you have less money, screened long-stemmed one-hitters)-- smoking-related harm reduction big time, making all concerns about the "dangers" of both cannabis and tobacco moot forever, and I think these panic punishments will fade away out of history.
death for pot??
It is really a very sad story; and to think that such deeds are completely the fault of the US policy of punishing anything that goes beyond the approved scope of the big corporations ways of making money on the damaging marketing of their poisoning products, but still legal... How easy is to get an agreement with - usually - third world countries on that kind of issues, I mean like drug related offences; and I wonder how much money has been paid to mantain such a shameful type of world order! Now, this kind of stories just ask for immediate action, it is not just a line in the news, is the life of a fellow human being.
Reverse it
Maybe the scum who made the death penalty for a plant should be sent to death row.
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