One of the world's most corrupt country, even in legal system! No justice overthere!.
Trapped Inside a Broken Judicial System After Hitting Send
Ed Wray for The New York Times
“People always lose to the powerful in this country. I’m a mother, a regular person like everybody else, so a lot of people identified with me and felt sympathy.” PRITA MULYASARI
PRITA MULYASARI became famous, as her lawyer put it, for going from “e-mail to jail.”
Her ordeal began when she sent an e-mail message complaining about the poor treatment she received at a hospital to 20 relatives, friends and co-workers. The message, forwarded from one mailing list to another, eventually fell into the hands of the hospital’s lawyers, who sued for defamation. In no time, Ms. Mulyasari, 32, a mother of two infants, found herself sharing a jail cell with murderers and facing six years in prison, seemingly yet another ordinary Indonesian caught up in one of the world’s most corrupt legal systems.
And yet Ms. Mulyasari’s story didn’t end there. After word of her predicament leaked out, support for her swelled in Indonesia’s freewheeling news media and blogosphere, forcing the authorities to release her after three weeks in jail.
“People always lose to the powerful in this country,” Mrs. Mulyasari said. “I’m a mother, a regular person like everybody else, so a lot of people identified with me and felt sympathy.”
Being a symbol made her visibly uncomfortable, though, as she posed for photographs for supporters at a court hearing this week here in Tangerang, a city near the capital, Jakarta. A ruling in her trial is expected later this month, and Mrs. Mulyasari said she was hoping that a not-guilty verdict would allow her to slip back into anonymity. Prosecutors are seeking a six-month sentence.
Whatever the judgment, it will be scrutinized because of an unrelated, continuing scandal involving the national police, attorney general’s office and anticorruption agency. Recent revelations have put a spotlight on a judicial netherworld where the rich routinely bribe corrupt police officials, prosecutors and judges for favorable treatment.
Meanwhile, ordinary people appear subject to severe punishment for seemingly harmless infractions. Last month, an illiterate grandmother in Central Java was convicted of stealing cacao fruits worth 15 cents, which she took by mistake, from a plantation company and handed a suspended sentence of 45 days. A Jakarta man arrested for charging his cellphone in a hallway inside his building is now on trial for theft.
As for Ms. Mulyasari, she said she had lost faith in the country’s legal system.
“My only hope is to pray and to appeal to the judge’s humanity,” she said, a few minutes before her hearing began.
On this morning, as they had done for every court hearing in recent months, Ms. Mulyasari and her husband, Andri Nugroho, 30, took a day off from work and left their two children at home. It was her lawyers’ turn to argue that Ms. Mulyasari had had no intention of forwarding her e-mail message beyond the original recipients.
In a courtroom with no air-conditioning, where many fanned themselves with sheets of paper, her lawyers took turns reading from a 178-page brief. Ms. Mulyasari, who did not speak, sat by herself in a chair facing three judges on an elevated bench. Only the white hijab covering her head was visible from the gallery.
It all began one night 16 months ago when Ms. Mulyasari went to the Omni International Hospital here with a high fever, a few months after the birth of her second child. She had driven by the hospital many times before and had been drawn by the word “international” on the modern building’s facade. “You think the service must be good, that the standards are international,” she said during breaks in the hearing.
ACCORDING to Mrs. Mulyasari’s account, she was diagnosed with dengue fever, an infectious disease transmitted by mosquitoes that is common here, and began receiving injections. But her condition kept getting worse. As her neck, left hand and left eye swelled, she had trouble breathing. After six days at Omni, she transferred herself to another hospital, which immediately diagnosed her with mumps and treated her.
Angry about her treatment at Omni and what she described as the staff’s unresponsiveness, she composed the long e-mail message detailing her experience there, criticizing physicians and others by name. Then, using her Yahoo account, she fired it off to her circle of family, friends and colleagues at the bank where she works in customer service. “I don’t want to know who forwarded it,” she said, “because they’re all family and friends.”
The message flitted from one address to another, bouncing onto a Yahoo mailing list of Indonesian physicians, before being picked up by Omni.
The hospital’s lawyers filed a civil lawsuit, eventually winning $21,600 in damages, a ruling that Ms. Mulyasari’s chief lawyer, Slamet Yuwono, is planning to appeal. What’s more, acting on the hospital’s complaints, prosecutors at first pursued criminal charges of defamation, which carries a maximum four-year prison sentence. Lawyers for Omni did not return phone calls requesting comment.
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