April 10, 2026 • 17 mins
There are more than 70 Kiwis banged up abroad, according to new data.
But, the true figure is likely higher, with many detainees choosing not to tell the New Zealand government they’ve been arrested.
They’re detained across dozens of countries, from the US and Australia to parts of Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
NZ Herald senior journalist Anna Leask has been looking into New Zealanders locked up overseas, she joins us today on The Front Page.
Follow The Front Page on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can read more about this and other stories in the New Zealand Herald, online at nzherald.co.nz, or tune in to news bulletins across the NZME network.
Host: Chelsea Daniels
Editor/Producer: Richard Martin
Producer: Jane Yee
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Kiyota.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a
daily podcast presented by the New Zealand Herald. There are
more than seventy kiwis banged up abroad, according to new data,
but the true figure is likely higher, with many detainees
choosing not to actually tell the New Zealand government that
(00:28):
they've been arrested. They're detained across dozens of countries, from
the US and Australia to parts of Asia, Europe and
the Middle East. Zaid Herald's senior journalist an Elisk has
been looking into New Zealanders locked up overseas. She joins
us today on the Front Page. First off, An tell
(00:50):
me about people banged up abroad? What are they mostly
in for? How many are there?
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Look? In fact, no, of seventy odd cases of kiwis
and prisons sees there are that on remand a waiting
court action or have been sentenced. The cases span everything
from minor drug allegations right up until you know, big
sort of myth and heroin busts and trafficking and exploitation
and murder. So you know, we've got kewis in prison
(01:18):
all over the world for all sorts of different things.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
And why might they there be more than what we
know of.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
So when you are arrested overseas, it's up to you
whether you let the government here know. In FAT only
have limited details because it's only it sort of captures
those who voluntarily make contact and let them know. So
while there's you know, sort of between seventy and eighty
Kewis on their list that they know of, there may
be more out there that just have not, you know,
(01:47):
let the government know that don't want to let the
government know for whatever reason, they've just not made that contact.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
What are some of the reasons as to why someone
might not want to contact m FAT.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
I guess there's a lot of reasons people choose not
to contact m FAT. They didn't list them when they
provided us this information. But I would imagine it might
be Keywis that have lived outside New Zealand for a
long long time. If you've lived in Australia for twenty
or thirty years, you might not necessarily feel like you
want to contact your old government. You know, people might
(02:19):
be trying to hide it from their friends and family.
You know, they might just not want people to know.
They might be embarrassed or ashamed or just and you
know there might be people out there that also just
don't know. It doesn't occur to them to contact they're
in government for help or they think they might get
in trouble. So I guess there's lots of you know,
lots of reasons people would choose not to contact the
(02:41):
government when they're in trouble overseas.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
What's one of the most recent cases that comes to mind.
The first that comes to my mind, I suppose are
those twenty two year olds arrested in Melbourne.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Yeah, so they've got the two women in Melbourne charged
with trying to import a lot of myth into Australia. Recently,
man from Northland, Raymond Parkinson, was sentenced to nearly ten
years in prison in Victoria for his role in a
heroine smuggling plot. The police found two million dollars worth
of the drug and his luggage when he was coming
(03:13):
back from overseas. He claimed it was a cryptocurrency scam
that he was supposed to be getting paid and he
didn't know that drugs were in there, and so that
went to trial and ultimately a jury found that he
knew Darwell was in his bags and he is now
locked up for a long time in Victoria. So that's
probably the most recent cases that I've covered.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Are most of the key we's abroad who are locked up?
Are they mostly in Australia.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
A lot of them are. There are a lot of
them in Asia, America, There's less in Europe, but I
think from my research there are you know, the majority
of them are in Australia at the moment.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
And in terms of when you get the data, they
obviously need to be really careful about giving it too
much away. Is there a certain point where they just
like cannot give you too much information because like one
person has been locked up in like Afghanistan or something.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
Yeah, and the stats sort of show, you know, it's
broken down to Australia, Asia, the USA or America and Europe.
And then there was another category in the data set,
so and that was very small numbers of people that
are sort of in really specific places around the world
that m FAT aren't able to share because of those
(04:28):
privacy rules. But you know, as you would expect, it's
it's mostly Asia and Australia where he wos are finding
themselves in the most trouble. These days.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
I remember this one case and you'll be able to
help me with his name, and you cover it on
Europe podcast A Moment in Crime is it Blaze.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Coot so baj Kott Blaje. He's an Auckland originally grew
up there with his parents and his sister. He moved
to the States and he was attending Cornell University where
he met a woman called Caroline Coffee. And now they
got married in two thousand and nine. And you know,
(05:06):
they were sitting in their apartment one night uploading their
wedding photos to social media, and then hours later she
was found dead in a park near their home. She
had a throat slit and her body abandoned. And then
Blaje was found by police, I believe in a crashed
car with self inflicted wounds to himself and had set
(05:28):
fire to their apartment and obviously tried to take off.
Now he was arrested and charged in the States with murder,
I think arson and tampering with physical evidence, and he
was sentenced to a life sentence there. So he's sort
of the probably one of the most famous ones I've
written about, and also Michael James Pratt and Matthew Wolfe,
(05:51):
who were running websites, including one called Girls Do Pawn. Basically,
you know, Pratt was the ring leader of this large
scale criminal scheme and they recruited these young women under
the false pretenses of modeling and would film them in
all these awful and awkward positions and promise them and
(06:11):
would never be shared, and they were uploading it to
adult websites and making a lot of money off it.
So they were all done with effectively sex trafficking. And
they'll spend both of them from christ Church and they
will spend a lengthy amount of time in prison in
the States. Pratt was even on the FBI's most Wanted
list for a while there because he was overseas and
making his way around the world and no one could
(06:32):
catch him. But eventually they did catch up with him
and now are starving that really serious time in the US.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
It is interesting when we see Kiwis on the world
stage doing these kind of things. I remember when Pratt
was on the FBI's ten most Wanted list and it's
kind of like, what what is a kei we doing
on there? And I suppose as well, the Kiwis and
Australians when we get into trouble in the likes of Asia,
whether there is a death penalty for importing or exporting drugs,
(07:01):
and even a small amount of drugs as well in
Asia there's the death penalty. It really does make those headlines.
What are some of the most famous cases that come
to your mind in terms of like, you know, those
kind of ones where we keep seeing the headlines and
you know they may be all over and done with now,
But what are ones that first come to mind to
you for you?
Speaker 1 (07:22):
I think the most famous case I think will be
Lorrain and Aaron Cohen. They were from Auckland. In nineteen
eighty five, they were arrested in Malaysia for heroin possession.
Malaysia had mandatory death penalty drug laws at the time,
and Lorraine was actually sentenced to death, which was later
commuted to a life sentence on appeal, and her son,
(07:44):
who's just eighteen at the time, received life imprisonment and
corporal punishment. Both were pardoned and released in the nineties
and came back here, but still that's a long time
they served in prison in Malaysia. The other one that
is sort of I guess most well known in my
time is Anthony de Melmonch. Now he is a pensioner
(08:07):
from the North Island. He went to Bali thinking he
was going, you know, to meet a woman he was
involved and this he got involved in a romance scam effectively,
and now he ended up in the you know, Balley's
most famous prison with a Bali nine and Chappelle Corby
have all spent time. He was caught with one point
(08:29):
seven killers of myth in his circase and he was
basically unknowingly used as a drug meal. His defense is
that he was unknowingly used as a drug meal after
I was targeted through this online romance scam. Now he
was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. The death penalty
was on the table for him, but it wasn't imposed.
In the end, he's still in Bali. He's he's aging,
(08:53):
he's very unwell, and his lawyers are still sort of
working on appeals and processes and trying to get him
back home. But at the moment he's in that awful,
overcrowded prison in Bali doing his time. So they would
be sort of the most famous ones that I would
(09:13):
speak of.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
Yeah, at the moment, I think I've been here about
five or six times since I was sixteen, So.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
You've always been aware of the dangers of bringing drugs.
You are always understood that was not a good idea. Yeah,
I know, I know. I don't even spoke drugs.
Speaker 4 (09:41):
I don't have drugs, and I've had no your own
test and I'm blood test and the negative.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
I'm not a drug user. You weren't just being naive
and silly and thinking I'll give it a shot.
Speaker 4 (09:54):
No, no, not if I get death BELDI not if
I can be here twenty years and never have a baby,
never have a life.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
It's interesting coming from this part of the world as well,
and especially you've got Indonesia. You mentioned the Bali nine
and Chappelle Corby. Of course you know these are major,
massive cases coming out of Indonesia. I remember when Chappelle
was actually allowed to go back to her home in Queensland.
That the flight, the plane that took her from Dempessa
(10:27):
to Brisbane. I think it was was just her, a
couple of others and then mainly journalists. Why do you
think that there is such an intense, uh, you know,
fascination with people banged up abroad. There's a whole TV
show about it.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Yeah, I think it's it's the prisons that these people
are in, like Carabican where Chappelle, Corby was and Anthony
de Melmontra. It's a world so far away from what
we're used to. I mean, most of us wouldn't even
know what a normal prison is like, let alone these
sort of new, notorious overseas prisons. You know, hearing about
(11:04):
seeing Chappelle and Coughton, you know the books and the
interviews that she did in prison. It's, you know, seeing
the conditions that people are living in. I think there's
just a fascination with it. You know, I've been there myself.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
In Bali.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
I went to see if I could speak to a
kibi who was locked up. Lisa Ormsby was there. She'd
recently been arrested waiting her next hearing, I think, on
drug charges, and you know, we went there and spoke
to the stuff, and it's to see if we could
see her, and just even that the sort of the
main office area is so basic and so unlike anything
i'd seen, you know, in New Zealand prisons. We didn't
(11:41):
yet and we didn't get to see her at the time.
She wanted to sort of focus on her defense, which
went really well. She spent a short, you know, comparatively
short time in prison over there. She admitted that she had,
you know, not serious drugs. I think she was caught
with cannabis. Admitted she was using drugs, which you know,
(12:02):
it gives you a huge discount in Indonesia if you
sort of admit to using and having an addiction or
anything like that. And she, you know, returned to New
Zealand eventually as well. But it's just you thinking of
you know, people like yourself from normal t we life
that go on these holidays and end up is they
banged up in these prisons that just sound and look
(12:24):
absolutely terrifying. And you've heard about the conditions and the
overcrowding and the rats and the sickness and the lack
of food and health and medical stuff. And I think
there's a fascination with how people survive that, you know,
particularly those who for years and years and years, like
Chappelle face you know, she's going to be there forever.
(12:44):
Is she going to face the death penalty, you know,
firing squads and all of these things you hear about.
So I think that's where the fascination is from. It's
just so far removed from normal kea wee life that
we just we love to read about it and to
know about it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
I remember in Aussie when the Bali Nine, the two
leaders of the Bali Nine, were executed by firing a
squad in Indonesia, it was rolling news coverage on Sky News.
I think they even did, you know, like a live
live view outside of the prison where it happened and everything.
I guess defending people charged in these different jurisdictions is
(13:21):
quite difficult as well, because not only do you have
a different jurisdiction, but you've got different laws, different customs.
I mean, what's that like for these lawyers trying to
get these people out.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
Yeah, it's hard. I mean the advice I've had is that,
you know, language and processes are different in every country.
Some of them are as clear cut as New Zealand,
some of them may not be as fair, and there's
a lot of corruption out there obviously, so finding a
good lawyer can be really really hard. Finding a lawyer
that understands you, that speaks English in that country, a
(13:57):
lawyer that's not potentially working for the police or having
other ulterior motives you're also if you've got financial resources,
you're obviously going to do better, but you know, being
cut off from your family and friends and everything. You know,
on top of that, you're trying to navigate a foreign
justice system is you know, lawyers tell me it's extremely hard.
(14:18):
And while they can come in and you know, try
to help him, get you someone local that can help it,
it can be extremely difficult and challenging for people that
are in custody.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Yeah, we've delved into this topic before. Actually I was
remembering it and I looked it up. It was basically
what Kiwis can do if they get arrested overseas, and
that was in March twenty twenty four when those brothers
were accused of assaulting a cop in Thailand. Basically, the
idea is that it's a good idea to chuck that
she'll be right attitude. Kiwis have got a very big
(14:49):
approach to she'll be right. I'll be caught with this,
but oh well, and realize that, Yeah, different countries have
different rules and sometimes they're a lot harsher than you sing.
What's some other advice that you've heard?
Speaker 1 (15:03):
I mean, the best advice is if you are arrested overseas,
get hold of in FAT you know, the embassy officials
in that country as soon as you can, you know,
get your family onto it. And there's an organizational law aid.
And I spoke to one of the lawyers, Craig Tuck,
who's sort of the head guy for that. He's worked
with Anthony de Melmonch and others, so he knows what
(15:26):
he's doing and he knows how to get you know,
the right lawyers and the right people to help you overseas.
So has advice is just to contact in FAT or
law aid immediately if you've been arrested or if your
your family member has been arrested. Don't don't risk it,
don't wait and hope that someone will help. It's, you know,
get someone that knows what they're doing to connect you
(15:47):
with the right people and navigate that process from their
get go, because you know it's you're going to be
dealing with so many things that are so crazy and
so different just in daylyf survival in an overseas prison,
that you need someone advocating for you that knows the
system and knows what they're doing to get you the
(16:09):
best result and to you know, make sure that you're
being treated properly and fairly. I guess the other advice
from you know, anyone that you know, any of the
agencies is just don't. Don't do drugs overseas. Don't think
you can cheat the system. Don't It's not worth it
because these overseas prisons are nothing like you can imagine
and nothing like we have in New Zealand. They're hard
(16:29):
and they're often awful, isolating, challenging and scary. So you know,
just think twice before you do anything that you could
get in trouble for.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
Thanks for joining us, Anna, Thanks Chelsea, thanks for having me.
That's it for this episode of the Front Page. You
can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage
at enzidhrald dot co dot nz. The Front Page is
hosted and produced by me Chelsea Daniels Caine. Dicky is
(16:58):
our studio operator, Richard Martin, our producer and editor, and
our executive producer is Jane Ye. Follow the Front Page
on the iHeart app or wherever you get your podcasts,
and join us next time for another look beyond the headlines.
Kiyota.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a
daily podcast presented by the New Zealand Herald. There are
more than seventy kiwis banged up abroad, according to new data,
but the true figure is likely higher, with many detainees
choosing not to actually tell the New Zealand government that
(00:28):
they've been arrested. They're detained across dozens of countries, from
the US and Australia to parts of Asia, Europe and
the Middle East. Zaid Herald's senior journalist an Elisk has
been looking into New Zealanders locked up overseas. She joins
us today on the Front Page. First off, An tell
(00:50):
me about people banged up abroad? What are they mostly
in for? How many are there?
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Look? In fact, no, of seventy odd cases of kiwis
and prisons sees there are that on remand a waiting
court action or have been sentenced. The cases span everything
from minor drug allegations right up until you know, big
sort of myth and heroin busts and trafficking and exploitation
and murder. So you know, we've got kewis in prison
(01:18):
all over the world for all sorts of different things.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
And why might they there be more than what we
know of.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
So when you are arrested overseas, it's up to you
whether you let the government here know. In FAT only
have limited details because it's only it sort of captures
those who voluntarily make contact and let them know. So
while there's you know, sort of between seventy and eighty
Kewis on their list that they know of, there may
be more out there that just have not, you know,
(01:47):
let the government know that don't want to let the
government know for whatever reason, they've just not made that contact.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
What are some of the reasons as to why someone
might not want to contact m FAT.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
I guess there's a lot of reasons people choose not
to contact m FAT. They didn't list them when they
provided us this information. But I would imagine it might
be Keywis that have lived outside New Zealand for a
long long time. If you've lived in Australia for twenty
or thirty years, you might not necessarily feel like you
want to contact your old government. You know, people might
(02:19):
be trying to hide it from their friends and family.
You know, they might just not want people to know.
They might be embarrassed or ashamed or just and you
know there might be people out there that also just
don't know. It doesn't occur to them to contact they're
in government for help or they think they might get
in trouble. So I guess there's lots of you know,
lots of reasons people would choose not to contact the
(02:41):
government when they're in trouble overseas.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
What's one of the most recent cases that comes to mind.
The first that comes to my mind, I suppose are
those twenty two year olds arrested in Melbourne.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Yeah, so they've got the two women in Melbourne charged
with trying to import a lot of myth into Australia. Recently,
man from Northland, Raymond Parkinson, was sentenced to nearly ten
years in prison in Victoria for his role in a
heroine smuggling plot. The police found two million dollars worth
of the drug and his luggage when he was coming
(03:13):
back from overseas. He claimed it was a cryptocurrency scam
that he was supposed to be getting paid and he
didn't know that drugs were in there, and so that
went to trial and ultimately a jury found that he
knew Darwell was in his bags and he is now
locked up for a long time in Victoria. So that's
probably the most recent cases that I've covered.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Are most of the key we's abroad who are locked up?
Are they mostly in Australia.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
A lot of them are. There are a lot of
them in Asia, America, There's less in Europe, but I
think from my research there are you know, the majority
of them are in Australia at the moment.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
And in terms of when you get the data, they
obviously need to be really careful about giving it too
much away. Is there a certain point where they just
like cannot give you too much information because like one
person has been locked up in like Afghanistan or something.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
Yeah, and the stats sort of show, you know, it's
broken down to Australia, Asia, the USA or America and Europe.
And then there was another category in the data set,
so and that was very small numbers of people that
are sort of in really specific places around the world
that m FAT aren't able to share because of those
(04:28):
privacy rules. But you know, as you would expect, it's
it's mostly Asia and Australia where he wos are finding
themselves in the most trouble. These days.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
I remember this one case and you'll be able to
help me with his name, and you cover it on
Europe podcast A Moment in Crime is it Blaze.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Coot so baj Kott Blaje. He's an Auckland originally grew
up there with his parents and his sister. He moved
to the States and he was attending Cornell University where
he met a woman called Caroline Coffee. And now they
got married in two thousand and nine. And you know,
(05:06):
they were sitting in their apartment one night uploading their
wedding photos to social media, and then hours later she
was found dead in a park near their home. She
had a throat slit and her body abandoned. And then
Blaje was found by police, I believe in a crashed
car with self inflicted wounds to himself and had set
(05:28):
fire to their apartment and obviously tried to take off.
Now he was arrested and charged in the States with murder,
I think arson and tampering with physical evidence, and he
was sentenced to a life sentence there. So he's sort
of the probably one of the most famous ones I've
written about, and also Michael James Pratt and Matthew Wolfe,
(05:51):
who were running websites, including one called Girls Do Pawn. Basically,
you know, Pratt was the ring leader of this large
scale criminal scheme and they recruited these young women under
the false pretenses of modeling and would film them in
all these awful and awkward positions and promise them and
(06:11):
would never be shared, and they were uploading it to
adult websites and making a lot of money off it.
So they were all done with effectively sex trafficking. And
they'll spend both of them from christ Church and they
will spend a lengthy amount of time in prison in
the States. Pratt was even on the FBI's most Wanted
list for a while there because he was overseas and
making his way around the world and no one could
(06:32):
catch him. But eventually they did catch up with him
and now are starving that really serious time in the US.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
It is interesting when we see Kiwis on the world
stage doing these kind of things. I remember when Pratt
was on the FBI's ten most Wanted list and it's
kind of like, what what is a kei we doing
on there? And I suppose as well, the Kiwis and
Australians when we get into trouble in the likes of Asia,
whether there is a death penalty for importing or exporting drugs,
(07:01):
and even a small amount of drugs as well in
Asia there's the death penalty. It really does make those headlines.
What are some of the most famous cases that come
to your mind in terms of like, you know, those
kind of ones where we keep seeing the headlines and
you know they may be all over and done with now,
But what are ones that first come to mind to
you for you?
Speaker 1 (07:22):
I think the most famous case I think will be
Lorrain and Aaron Cohen. They were from Auckland. In nineteen
eighty five, they were arrested in Malaysia for heroin possession.
Malaysia had mandatory death penalty drug laws at the time,
and Lorraine was actually sentenced to death, which was later
commuted to a life sentence on appeal, and her son,
(07:44):
who's just eighteen at the time, received life imprisonment and
corporal punishment. Both were pardoned and released in the nineties
and came back here, but still that's a long time
they served in prison in Malaysia. The other one that
is sort of I guess most well known in my
time is Anthony de Melmonch. Now he is a pensioner
(08:07):
from the North Island. He went to Bali thinking he
was going, you know, to meet a woman he was
involved and this he got involved in a romance scam effectively,
and now he ended up in the you know, Balley's
most famous prison with a Bali nine and Chappelle Corby
have all spent time. He was caught with one point
(08:29):
seven killers of myth in his circase and he was
basically unknowingly used as a drug meal. His defense is
that he was unknowingly used as a drug meal after
I was targeted through this online romance scam. Now he
was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. The death penalty
was on the table for him, but it wasn't imposed.
In the end, he's still in Bali. He's he's aging,
(08:53):
he's very unwell, and his lawyers are still sort of
working on appeals and processes and trying to get him
back home. But at the moment he's in that awful,
overcrowded prison in Bali doing his time. So they would
be sort of the most famous ones that I would
(09:13):
speak of.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
Yeah, at the moment, I think I've been here about
five or six times since I was sixteen, So.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
You've always been aware of the dangers of bringing drugs.
You are always understood that was not a good idea. Yeah,
I know, I know. I don't even spoke drugs.
Speaker 4 (09:41):
I don't have drugs, and I've had no your own
test and I'm blood test and the negative.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
I'm not a drug user. You weren't just being naive
and silly and thinking I'll give it a shot.
Speaker 4 (09:54):
No, no, not if I get death BELDI not if
I can be here twenty years and never have a baby,
never have a life.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
It's interesting coming from this part of the world as well,
and especially you've got Indonesia. You mentioned the Bali nine
and Chappelle Corby. Of course you know these are major,
massive cases coming out of Indonesia. I remember when Chappelle
was actually allowed to go back to her home in Queensland.
That the flight, the plane that took her from Dempessa
(10:27):
to Brisbane. I think it was was just her, a
couple of others and then mainly journalists. Why do you
think that there is such an intense, uh, you know,
fascination with people banged up abroad. There's a whole TV
show about it.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Yeah, I think it's it's the prisons that these people
are in, like Carabican where Chappelle, Corby was and Anthony
de Melmontra. It's a world so far away from what
we're used to. I mean, most of us wouldn't even
know what a normal prison is like, let alone these
sort of new, notorious overseas prisons. You know, hearing about
(11:04):
seeing Chappelle and Coughton, you know the books and the
interviews that she did in prison. It's, you know, seeing
the conditions that people are living in. I think there's
just a fascination with it. You know, I've been there myself.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
In Bali.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
I went to see if I could speak to a
kibi who was locked up. Lisa Ormsby was there. She'd
recently been arrested waiting her next hearing, I think, on
drug charges, and you know, we went there and spoke
to the stuff, and it's to see if we could
see her, and just even that the sort of the
main office area is so basic and so unlike anything
i'd seen, you know, in New Zealand prisons. We didn't
(11:41):
yet and we didn't get to see her at the time.
She wanted to sort of focus on her defense, which
went really well. She spent a short, you know, comparatively
short time in prison over there. She admitted that she had,
you know, not serious drugs. I think she was caught
with cannabis. Admitted she was using drugs, which you know,
(12:02):
it gives you a huge discount in Indonesia if you
sort of admit to using and having an addiction or
anything like that. And she, you know, returned to New
Zealand eventually as well. But it's just you thinking of
you know, people like yourself from normal t we life
that go on these holidays and end up is they
banged up in these prisons that just sound and look
(12:24):
absolutely terrifying. And you've heard about the conditions and the
overcrowding and the rats and the sickness and the lack
of food and health and medical stuff. And I think
there's a fascination with how people survive that, you know,
particularly those who for years and years and years, like
Chappelle face you know, she's going to be there forever.
(12:44):
Is she going to face the death penalty, you know,
firing squads and all of these things you hear about.
So I think that's where the fascination is from. It's
just so far removed from normal kea wee life that
we just we love to read about it and to
know about it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
I remember in Aussie when the Bali Nine, the two
leaders of the Bali Nine, were executed by firing a
squad in Indonesia, it was rolling news coverage on Sky News.
I think they even did, you know, like a live
live view outside of the prison where it happened and everything.
I guess defending people charged in these different jurisdictions is
(13:21):
quite difficult as well, because not only do you have
a different jurisdiction, but you've got different laws, different customs.
I mean, what's that like for these lawyers trying to
get these people out.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
Yeah, it's hard. I mean the advice I've had is that,
you know, language and processes are different in every country.
Some of them are as clear cut as New Zealand,
some of them may not be as fair, and there's
a lot of corruption out there obviously, so finding a
good lawyer can be really really hard. Finding a lawyer
that understands you, that speaks English in that country, a
(13:57):
lawyer that's not potentially working for the police or having
other ulterior motives you're also if you've got financial resources,
you're obviously going to do better, but you know, being
cut off from your family and friends and everything. You know,
on top of that, you're trying to navigate a foreign
justice system is you know, lawyers tell me it's extremely hard.
(14:18):
And while they can come in and you know, try
to help him, get you someone local that can help it,
it can be extremely difficult and challenging for people that
are in custody.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Yeah, we've delved into this topic before. Actually I was
remembering it and I looked it up. It was basically
what Kiwis can do if they get arrested overseas, and
that was in March twenty twenty four when those brothers
were accused of assaulting a cop in Thailand. Basically, the
idea is that it's a good idea to chuck that
she'll be right attitude. Kiwis have got a very big
(14:49):
approach to she'll be right. I'll be caught with this,
but oh well, and realize that, Yeah, different countries have
different rules and sometimes they're a lot harsher than you sing.
What's some other advice that you've heard?
Speaker 1 (15:03):
I mean, the best advice is if you are arrested overseas,
get hold of in FAT you know, the embassy officials
in that country as soon as you can, you know,
get your family onto it. And there's an organizational law aid.
And I spoke to one of the lawyers, Craig Tuck,
who's sort of the head guy for that. He's worked
with Anthony de Melmonch and others, so he knows what
(15:26):
he's doing and he knows how to get you know,
the right lawyers and the right people to help you overseas.
So has advice is just to contact in FAT or
law aid immediately if you've been arrested or if your
your family member has been arrested. Don't don't risk it,
don't wait and hope that someone will help. It's, you know,
get someone that knows what they're doing to connect you
(15:47):
with the right people and navigate that process from their
get go, because you know it's you're going to be
dealing with so many things that are so crazy and
so different just in daylyf survival in an overseas prison,
that you need someone advocating for you that knows the
system and knows what they're doing to get you the
(16:09):
best result and to you know, make sure that you're
being treated properly and fairly. I guess the other advice
from you know, anyone that you know, any of the
agencies is just don't. Don't do drugs overseas. Don't think
you can cheat the system. Don't It's not worth it
because these overseas prisons are nothing like you can imagine
and nothing like we have in New Zealand. They're hard
(16:29):
and they're often awful, isolating, challenging and scary. So you know,
just think twice before you do anything that you could
get in trouble for.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
Thanks for joining us, Anna, Thanks Chelsea, thanks for having me.
That's it for this episode of the Front Page. You
can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage
at enzidhrald dot co dot nz. The Front Page is
hosted and produced by me Chelsea Daniels Caine. Dicky is
(16:58):
our studio operator, Richard Martin, our producer and editor, and
our executive producer is Jane Ye. Follow the Front Page
on the iHeart app or wherever you get your podcasts,
and join us next time for another look beyond the headlines.
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