Mary Jane Veloso

Mary Jane Fiesta Veloso (born January 10, 1985 ) is a Filipino woman who was arrested in Indonesia for drug trafficking in 2010 and then sentenced to death.

To help provide for her family, Veloso emigrated to Dubai in 2009 to work as a household service worker, however she soon returned to the Philippines before the end of her two-year contract after an attempted rape by her employer.

In April 2010, Veloso was recruited by Maria Kristina Sergio to be employed as a domestic servant in Malaysia.

To cover administrative costs, Veloso paid Sergio PHP 20,000 in cash as well as giving her a motorcycle and her cell phone.

On arrival in Kuala Lumpur, Sergio told Veloso that the job was no longer available, however she had arranged similar employment in Indonesia for her instead, so Veloso stayed at the Sun Inn Lagoon Hotel in Bandar Sunway while waiting for her next flight a few days later.

As Veloso had arrived in Malaysia with only 2 pairs of jeans and a couple of tee shirts, Sergio brought her shopping at the nearby Sunway Pyramid for new clothes to wear.

Realizing all of the additional items would not fit into her small backpack, Sergio gave her a new empty suitcase to pack her things into.

Sergio then introduced Veloso to a Malaysian based African man named 'Ike', who gave her an Air Asia plane ticket and a cell phone number to call once she landed in Indonesia.

On 25 April 2010, Veloso arrived at Adisucipto International Airport in Yogyakarta.

Airport officials scanning Veloso's luggage in the X-ray machine were alerted to unusual objects and ordered her bag to be fully searched.

After finding nothing illegal amongst her possessions, the now empty suitcase was again scanned, and the customs officers confirmed they had detected suspicious items within it.

After dismantling Veloso's suitcase the officers discovered 2.6 kg of heroin hidden in the inner lining (worth an estimated US$500,000), which had been wrapped in aluminum foil and black plastic in an effort to avoid discovery' After her arrest, Mary Jane was provided with neither legal advice nor an interpreter or a Tagalog translator, even though the police interrogated her in Bahasa Indonesian (a language she did not understand).

After learning of Mary Jane's arrest, and getting details of the events that lead to it while speaking to her via a phone call from an Indonesian prison, Veloso's relatives travelled to Talavera to confront Maria Kristina Sergio.

They were warned not to contact the authorities or speak to the local media, as the international drug trafficking organization Sergio claimed to be a member of would take revenge on both Mary Jane and the rest of the Veloso family too if they exposed their activities.

Disregarding the warning, the Veloso family travelled to Manila in August 2010 to inform the Department of Foreign Affairs of Mary Jane's plight.

They also attempted to file a criminal case against Sergio with the National Bureau of Investigation, however they were informed they could not lodge a complaint due to a lack of evidence.

On 4 October 2010, Veloso's trial began in Yogyakarta's Sleman District Court.

Throughout her trial she maintained her innocence, claiming that she was duped into carrying the suitcase by her recruiter, a godsister of hers named Maria Kristina Sergio, who convinced her to travel to Indonesia after failing to get a job in Malaysia.

Veloso was represented during her trial by a state-funded attorney with little experience in capital cases, and

her court-appointed interpreter was an unlicensed student who translated proceedings from Bahasa into English, a language which Mary Jane had only a limited proficiency in.

The result of these errors was that throughout her trial Veloso had no meaningful understanding of the trial proceedings and could not communicate effectively with her lawyer, the court officials, or the trial judge.

An appellate lawyer would later remark that a pivotal moment occurred when the trial judge asked Veloso, in Bahasa Indonesian, if she regretted trafficking heroin into the country from Malaysia.

As she didn't speak the language, Mary Jane didn’t understand the question, and struggling for an answer under pressure she eventually replied "No".

On 11 October 2010 Veloso was found guilty as charged, with the court ruling "the accused could not prove the truth of her unawareness in court, so the accused’s denial cannot legally be used as a reason to free her of criminal responsibility”, adding that her denial of guilt was an aggravating factor. Despite public prosecutor Sri Anggraeni recommending life imprisonment as punishment, Veloso was sentenced to death by the presiding judge. When the court’s sentence against her was read out in Indonesian and then translated into English, Veloso did not understand its meaning. It was only later she realized she had received the death penalty after a priest explained it to her.

However, due to a moratorium on capital punishment enacted by Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Veloso's execution was put on indefinite hold.

After the 2014 election of Joko Widodo as President of Indonesia, the death penalty became active again as a judicial punishment.

Granted a temporary reprieve in 2015, she has remained on death row ever since and consistently protests her innocence to the present day.

Her case, among others, aroused international attention and widespread scrutiny of Indonesia's capital punishment and drug prohibition laws.

Veloso was born in Cabanatuan, Nueva Ecija, where she was the youngest of five siblings of a family who lived in extreme poverty.

Her father worked as a seasonal agricultural worker on sugar cane plantations of the José Cojuangco owned Hacienda Luisita, while also selling plastic-ware out of a pushcart and collecting discarded bottles and plastic to sell to junk shops.

Veloso dropped out in her first year of high school.

and married her husband when she was around 17 years old, however they later separated resulting in her becoming a single mother to two young sons.

On 24 March 2015, the Supreme Court of Indonesia rejected Veloso's final appeal and ordered that preparations for her execution to proceed.

On 25 April 2015, during a death row visit by her family and officials from the Philippine's Department of Foreign Affairs, Veloso handed over four handwritten letters addressed to Philippine President Benigno Aquino III, the Filipino youth, the Filipino women, and to those she held responsible for what happened to her.

The letters pleaded with the President to help spare her from the death penalty for the sake of her children, while also warning Filipino youth and women not to be fooled by illegal recruiters.

To the people who set her up, Veloso informed them they would have a guilty conscience for the rest of their lives unless they came forward to save her, while also stating that she prayed God would forgive them for all the evil they had committed.

Veloso was scheduled to be executed on the maximum security prison island of Nusa Kambangan together with the Bali Nine duo from Australia, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran; Brazilian Rodrigo Gularte; an Indonesian and four Nigerians at 1:00 AM WIB (2:00 AM PHT) on 29 April 2015.

On the morning of 28 April 2015, Maria Kristina Sergio unexpectedly surrendered to Philippine

authorities at Nueva Ecija Police Station in Luzon, claiming to have received death threats through online social media and via text message, saying that if Veloso was executed as scheduled she herself would be murdered in revenge.

Sergio was about to be indicted by the National Bureau of Investigation on charges of illegal recruitment, human trafficking, and estafa in relation to Veloso's case and claimed she turned herself in to prove her innocence of all the accusations against her.