Brit facing 60 years for smuggling cocaine

[thrifty24]

Not sure if this has been done already but having just watched the interview on This Morning I am baffled as to how she would agree to take the suitcase (ended up being two suitcases and one of the main reasons she was pulled aside on arrival in the US) in the first place. Even more odd, why did she accept a free holiday from two random guys she had met only two weeks prior? Interesting turn that she ended up having to flying via the US home instead of her planned flight Cancun - Uk and what a difference that will make in terms of potential punishment. There has to be more to this story

Did she not have any personal luggage with her? Not even a bikini and a
toothbrush?

She was told that they would ship her personal suitcase back home. Originally, she was only meant to carry one suitcase, but they gave her two.

I mean the main issue is, that's three different countries with three different legal systems. The US is known to have a very different legal system to anything in northwest Europe. The child rapist was sentenced in the UK then sent back to the Netherlands where they basically said "don't do it again son," and sent him on his way. The Netherlands has a different age of consent, too, which affects how they view what happens with children over 12.

The Peru Two initially claimed they had no idea what was in their suitcases. They were lying through their teeth too.

It’s the US, where people can end up being given 1000 year prison sentences. Not comparable with the UK system at all - I have a current patient who is in prison for couriering drugs into the UK and he got two years.

Have you any idea of the amount of atrocities carried out by the Mexican drug cartels it runs into thousands and they are pretty indiscriminate about who gets murdered.

She looks so different in her mugshot compared to her own sm photos. Back to the subject, I have no sympathy for those that smuggle drugs. I wish the length of the sentence could also apply to rapists, child killers and abusers too.

I would say she knew well what she was doing was wrong but she got over her head.

My guess is, they said ‘bring a suitcase back to the uk from America and we will give a free holiday and 100,000k or whatever amount of money’

Then she got there and they said it was 2 suitcases and they were going to hurt her family and it got serious then.

Some people are just very thick .
Sadly for her she'll pay the price .

Nobody was going to travel to the UK from Mexico to hurt her family.
Any refusal from her would have been a bullet in the head.
She's stupid beyond belief and was she caught per chance? Drug seizures are often dealt with by giving misinformation to protect sources.

Yes you are right, I’m just saying they threatened her with that, and she had no option then but to keep going then. She was really stupid.

Well for one, you need long sentences for this kind of thing to deter others. If it was say 5 years, there are people who'd be much more willing to take the risk.
Secondly, while other crimes are more horrific, the negative effects of drugs affect far more people. So you can't compare it to one off crimes. Those crimes should get longer sentences, rather than give shorter sentences for drug smuggling.

She's a fool and she deserves what she gets. If she was threatened then she should have sought help at the airport, if she wasn't able to before.

I have far more sympathy for the young lad currently being held in Dubai for having sex with the 17yr old girl. He should have been aware of the law there but he's only 18 himself. He shouldn't be in prison. If the government can help anyone in these scenarios (and I think what they can do is quite limited) it should be him.

I have far more sympathy for the young lad currently being held in Dubai for having sex with the 17yr old girl. He should have been aware of the law there but he's only 18 himself. He shouldn't be in prison. If the government can help anyone in these scenarios (and I think what they can do is quite limited) it should be him.

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Agree with this.

Maybe she watched Queen of the South and thought i'll give that a go.

Free holiday to Mexico of all places, carry this money back via a US airport, she is either thick as f*ck or naïve enough to think she would sail through and get away with it

Banged up Abroad needs to be rerun on the tv. The scariest episode for me was the woman who thought she got through customs and was home and dry and they approached her outside the airport.

There’s a film called Stillwater with Matt Damon in it and his daughter is in jail abroad I really enjoyed it.

She's an idiot, plain and simple, and knew the risks, she just thought she could outsmart border control. I once knew of someone who ended up in prison in Spain for drug smuggling, she got quite a hefty sentence if I remember right.

Either she knew what she was doing or she is criminally stupid.

Either way she should face the consequences.

Personally I don’t buy that anyone is that stupid.

I don't find her at all plausible and have no sympathy for her. She was offered a holiday and presumably, a sum of money and even if she thought it was cash she was carrying, she must have known that that was illegal.

If she'd been coerced, surely she'd have told customs, on landing?

She won't get 60 years, that's just the maximum possible. She'll be back in a UK prison after a couple of years, to serve her sentence out.

I just can’t believe in this day/age that people still fall for this crap. I remember when Patricia Cahill and Karyn Smith were in the news (got caught in Thailand smuggling heroin). I wasn’t even 10 at the time but had done enough international travel (we lived overseas) to know that you pack your own luggage, and you keep it with you at all times, and you never carry anything for anyone else. I don’t buy her story at all.

I think they make an example of idiots like this as a warning to the drug cartels, not to use mules. It does make me wonder how much gets through if they are still prepared to use those routes.

She must think everyone is as thick as she is ...

Zero sympathy here too.

Doesn’t every drug smuggler that is caught claim they were coerced, threatened or mislead about the contents of the case?
Why didn’t she question if they can ship her suitcase home, why couldn’t they ship the suitcases they gave her instead?

She did something stupid but she doesn't deserve that sentence. She was likely set up to be caught, possibly even by the group who coerced her into this - and I have no doubt she was coerced at some point, even if she went into it thinking easy life changing money at the outset. And now she's set up for a huge sentence by the authorities as a distraction from their gargantuan and ongoing failure to get a grip on this murderous multi billion multi national trade and the complicity of their own members in it, embedded at every level.

People like her aren't significant and her being in prison for the rest of her life won't change a thing wrt production and distribution of drugs. Giving interviews to prurient media and keeping herself visible is probably her best bet and that in itself is a pretty terrible position to be in.

No one can be that naive to think there’s nothing wrong with taking suitcases through customs for effectively strangers and thinking it’s ok for them to hold a quarter of a million pounds, then try to say I didn’t know when it turns out to be drugs, deserves all she gets