Any sympathy for the British drug mule in Georgia?

[mids2019]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14723481/drug-mule-suspect-company-director-Chinese-retailers-Amazon.html

I was reading about this girl and actually do have a little symapthy. She is obviously vain, stupid, misguidedly ambitious but I don't know whether she is real player in the drug trade and has probably been groomed into carrying drugs by men promising her the earth.

The penalties for drug smuggling are understandably harsh on Georgia but should the UK try and get her to serve a sentence in the UK?

Here is what happened to a young woman who tried to smuggle cannabis into the UK, to giove some perspective: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14726493/Pregnant-drugs-mule-spared-jail.html

The lack of critical thinking is astounding from some posters. What a completely irrelevant comparison.

As pp said, they are totally different countries! equally someone could post a news story about drug mules imprisoned for life or sentenced to death in other countries and say hey look at this for perspective 🙄 unless the case is about someone smuggling drugs into Georgia following the tightening up of drug smuggling legislation it’s utterly irrelevant
and foolish to bring it to the discussion.

The British story you post is an absolute outrage-maybe we should outsource our courts to countries who know how to punish and punish hard.

That's what people aren't getting.

Side note: I feel sorry for the unborn babies of both these young women.

And it does make me wonder if it’s not a coincidence that both are pregnant.

@socks1107 people posting violent inflammatory comments during a riot have always been dealt with harshly in the UK - see 2011 riots where young people were jailed for encouraging and coordinating riots via BlackBerry. You had even instances of opportunistic people jailed for stealing cheap goods like water from stores that had been smashed open by others.

They wouldn’t normally have been imprisoned for such acts, but because during a riot it’s in the interests of maintaining public order to act fast and hard, they do punish offenders involved (virtually or in person) very punitively.

This is nothing new except certain people didn’t care and even applauded the harsh sentences when it seemed to be mostly black and brown youth getting punished for the 2011 riots.

But suddenly they’re full of outrage and a sense of injustice for people like women who get online and encourage the burning of “asylum seeker” hotels containing individuals and families.

Wonder why that is?

What country do you suggest? Saudi Arabia? Afghanistan? Georgia?

It's kind of funny coming back to this thread having just seen several pages of "Keir Starmer rolling back Brexit" (no, he isn't) where multiple posters are saying that they refuse to go back to Europe and have Europe impose laws on the UK. And yet here are posters suggesting that it is wrong for other countries to have their own laws when ours would be perfectly adequate, that what might happen in the UK gives "perspective" (because presumably other countries must need perspective on the basis that they clearly aren't British). or that somehow it would be fair to send the woman (if convicted) back to the UK where we could promptly let her out of prison.

In many ways it doesn't matter whether anyone is sympathetic. It is sheer arrogance to assume that other countries don't know what they are doing because their laws are different than ours. I am implaccably opposed to the death sentence and I am glad I live in a country that doesn't have it. Other countries do, and whilst that may not be something that makes me happy, I have no right to tell them how to conduct their affairs. It is for their citizens to decide, and if they do not like what their governments are doing, then that is on them to deal with.

Equally, if people want to argue that an 18 year old is not grown up enough, then start out with they should not be allowed to vote, they should not be allowed to hold passports that allow them to travel alone, it's probably questionable whether we should let them out of school since they may not be responsible enough to work....what do people think would be the "right" age for them to be able to do these things? There is probably a legitimate argument around whether 10 years old (12 in Scotland) is an appropriate age to consider an individual capable of fully understanding criminal actions and responsibilities. If we are arguing that 18 year olds don't really understand these things, then we shouldn't be letting them out until they are old enough to do so.

And it has just occurred to me to add that when a 15 year old girl - clearly still a child - absconded to Syria with two friends, aided and abetted by a Canadian intelligence agent who could have stopped her (and one wonders what other intelligence services were involved) she knew perfectly well what she was doing, deserves everything she got and more, and has absolutely no right to the British citizenship that she was born to despite not haing been convicted of any crime. I assume that any minute now the Home Secretary will be stripping this nice white woman of her citizenship for being a criminal?

That is your personal opinion of "the harm done" - there is no fixed moral compass, and morality is personal. And it is still rank arrogance to assume that "our morals" (or "your morals"?) are superior to "Georgian morals". Are you saying that they are "less moral" than we (you?) are? The reason why countries have laws - whether you agree with them or not - is because they reflect a "fixed standard", a set of rules by which people agree to be governed. Those may change over time - in the UK we can look at laws we had only 50 years ago and consider then wrong; and 50 years from now people will be similarly shaking their heads and wondering what the hell we were thinking about having laws like we do today. There is no guarantee that those future laws will be "better" based on an individuals moral compass - I am opposed to the death penalty, but lots of British people think I am wrong, and maybe they will win that argument (or not).

Georgia has a set of laws with sentencing guidelines, just as we do. They have the sovereign right to set those laws, and if you don't like them you have two choices - don't go to Georgia, or if you do, don't break the law.

It was her choice to try to smuggle a lot of drugs into a country with very punative laws and I'm sure she had Google on her phone if she wanted to check them out in advance. I'll reserve my sympathy for people who have the misfortune to be born women, or gay, in countries with laws that discriminate against them.

Quite.

@Lordlaughaloudi don’t disagree with those punishments and what they wrote was appalling.
But they have been sentenced for their crime and yet this drug smuggler hasn’t. It makes no logical sense is what I was trying to say. The drugs could have caused so much harm to people
yet shes walking around free.

I think it’s a harsh sentence in Georgia and I do have some sympathy for the young lady there but our own legal system doesn’t make any sense either to me. The end user of drugs is one in a long line of criminals and anyone in that line should be punished for their part

Yep! They will do. Good suggestions-thanks!

@socks1107

In terms of it making no logical sense - well in the eyes of the law the reasoning is they need to use special measures to fasttack and punish harshly those involved in riots. So they can stop the country descending into total chaos and deter others.

As I said in my previous example - People stealing minor items wouldn’t normally be sentenced to prison. Punishments given for riots are always harsh for the reasons above.

I haven’t read into that other drug smuggling case in detail beyond the DM article but yes prima facie I agree it seems surprising that she didn’t get a more significant prison length.

However it looks as if she did actually spend some time in jail albeit only a short period

“He added that she has been remanded in custody for three months, during which time she suffered a miscarriage.Mr Gatland added: 'She has spent three months in custody and that will certainly serve as a deterrent to her to keep out of trouble in future.”

From what I can see online the punishment ranges from an unlimited fine to 5 years for Class B drug smuggling, so yes her short custodial punishment was on the more lenient side of that spectrum but within the guidelines

@PhilippaGeorgiou

I assume that any minute now the Home Secretary will be stripping this nice white woman of her citizenship for being a criminal?

You say this as if it would be an unwelcome outcome. What use is this vacuous, drug smuggling moron to us?

If she could be made to stay in Georgia I'd say good riddance.

Put her on a midnight train to Tbilisi.

What does the ‘morality’ of the crime have to do with it? The point is that the crime doesn’t have the same consequences in every country, and you can’t expect Georgia to deal with her in the same way the UK would.

She was dumb enough to smuggle drugs, transiting through countries where she knowingly risked a harsh penalty if caught. That’s on her idiot self.

I have some sympathy. I think that at 18, she is young and drug dealers sometimes feign love and promise relationships, which can sway someone into doing this. If she's locked up for 20+ years, that's her chances of motherhood over. Being trapped abroad must feel frightening. However, she has stupidly and selfishly put herself in this position. I hope that she gets some custody time there, but think that more than 10 years would be harsh.

Georgia has a big problem as ever since Turkey cracked down, it’s grown in popularity as a hub for the flow of drugs into Europe. Not only are they having to deal with the national effects of this (the impact of this on corruption and organized crime, rising numbers of opiate users etc) but they’re facing increasing amount of international pressure to combat it as well. Hence them not fucking around.

I mean.. a bit. She's 18 and facing possible decades in prison, I'd be inhuman not to shudder a bit at the thought of that. But mainly just thinking how could you BE such a fool.

If, to take a completely random example [cough], i had dodged a train fare at that age, I could have ended up with a criminal record. I would have felt lucky that I got away with it.

I do feel that as always, it's the young and dumb who absorb an increasing culture of normalised stuff that is still criminal. Drugs are a lot more common and accepted, shoplifting is all over the place. Alongside that the tech bros make their billions by making it normal to spend a ton of money on shite all the time, Trump talks about taking fat bribes like he can't even understand why it would be an issue. They dont listen to the fun sponges saying it's wrong and also incredibly dangerous.

I feel bad saying this but the only reason I have a bit of sympathy is because I feel she must be lacking in intelligence. Like who would give their passport details and agree to be fake CEO of a Chinese company they know nothing about. For just 550 pounds.

How many suitcases did that Miss Lee have? She must have needed about 10 cases to carry that amount.

Seriously is that your concern? Well Apparently this woman is pregnant although yes she won’t be a mother in that she can’t raise her child if she is in jail for two decades, but Not everyone needs to be a mother in any sense of the word.

She may have got better as a person as she aged but equally things could have escalated and she was pulled further into this. There’s enough terrible reckless mothers in the world!

If her parents raise her kid I can only hope they have more success with their grandkid than they did with her.

I understand but I just mean it’s quite indirect. Not like attacking someone.

In her case, I read it was cannabis?

Your last para is a point I had not considered before- and I think you are right.

We are not clear whether it was cannabis or a derivative, but the fact is that the vast majority of those children treated for addictions (bearing in mind that we will be talking about the most extreme of them as many will be under the radar) were using cannabis. As I said previously, people might take a different view if it is their child who is an addict because of people like her.

I think that people ought also to take into account that just because the sentence can be "up to 20 years" does not mean it will be, and it very likely won't be. Anyone know what the maximum penalty for importing drugs into the UK is? Life imprisonment. Seem harsh? That puts Georgia's laws into perspective, doesn't it? We wouldn't often impose the maximum sentence and I doubt Georgia does either. But British newspapers do love to up the ante on how utterly crass everywhere else is when it comes to Brits breaking the law - especially if they are young, female, pretty and have some wonderfully sexy photo's up on social media that they can exploit.