The bar mat and the big mouth
May 19th 2009 21:58
Annice Smoel, a 36-year-old mother of four girls from Melbourne, Australia, has been arrested while on holiday in Thailand and faces a maximum five-year gaol sentence. The crime for which she will be tried: stealing a bar mat.
Mrs Smoel was arrested on May 2 and is now on bail awaiting trial. Her passport has been confiscated.
Back in Australia, her four daughters, aged between six and 12, have made impassioned pleas to the Prime Minister, and her lawyer has claimed the Australian government has failed her — all the standard tactics of legal defence.
Meanwhile Mrs Smoel's husband Darren has flown to Thailand and is strutting around thumping his breast and making helpful threats such as, "I'm not leaving here without her, simple as that. No one is putting my wife in jail. I can tell you that right now. I will do whatever I have to do to get her out of here."
Mrs Smoel was in Phuket as part of celebrations for her mother's 60th birthday. On the evening she was arrested, two friends played a little prank, taking a mat from the counter of the bar and putting it into Mrs Smoel's handbag as a souvenir, without Mrs Smoel being aware of their action. The two friends have admitted this action.
That's where police found the stolen item, and the rest has caused outrage or glee, depending on whether you are an observer in Australia seeing a five-year jail term for a trivial offence, or a journalist in Australia seeing a particularly juicy story.
Annice Smoel will not spend five years in a Thai gaol. The five years is a maximum and there are clearly mitigating circumstances. Thailand may have different laws and different legal mandates, but its judges are not stupid.
But Mrs Smoel does deserve a penalty of some kind. Not for being party, if unwittingly, to theft, but for crass foolishness.
Speaking to reporters after her arrest, Mrs Smoel denied Thai police reports that she had been drunk and abusive, and said police acted because her group had comprised only 10 women, with no male available to negotiate a bribe.
"We were women on our own and we didn't have a man here to talk to the police and deal a bribe," she said. "If we had, that would have been the end of it. We offered them money right from the start because we knew that's how the system works here."
If Mrs Smoel had bothered to learn anything about Thai culture, she would have learned that they are a fiercely proud people. This angry disparagement of another country's ways, whether true or not, was hardly a sensible reaction.
Mrs Smoel was arrested on May 2 and is now on bail awaiting trial. Her passport has been confiscated.
Back in Australia, her four daughters, aged between six and 12, have made impassioned pleas to the Prime Minister, and her lawyer has claimed the Australian government has failed her — all the standard tactics of legal defence.
Meanwhile Mrs Smoel's husband Darren has flown to Thailand and is strutting around thumping his breast and making helpful threats such as, "I'm not leaving here without her, simple as that. No one is putting my wife in jail. I can tell you that right now. I will do whatever I have to do to get her out of here."
Mrs Smoel was in Phuket as part of celebrations for her mother's 60th birthday. On the evening she was arrested, two friends played a little prank, taking a mat from the counter of the bar and putting it into Mrs Smoel's handbag as a souvenir, without Mrs Smoel being aware of their action. The two friends have admitted this action.
That's where police found the stolen item, and the rest has caused outrage or glee, depending on whether you are an observer in Australia seeing a five-year jail term for a trivial offence, or a journalist in Australia seeing a particularly juicy story.
Annice Smoel will not spend five years in a Thai gaol. The five years is a maximum and there are clearly mitigating circumstances. Thailand may have different laws and different legal mandates, but its judges are not stupid.
But Mrs Smoel does deserve a penalty of some kind. Not for being party, if unwittingly, to theft, but for crass foolishness.
Speaking to reporters after her arrest, Mrs Smoel denied Thai police reports that she had been drunk and abusive, and said police acted because her group had comprised only 10 women, with no male available to negotiate a bribe.
"We were women on our own and we didn't have a man here to talk to the police and deal a bribe," she said. "If we had, that would have been the end of it. We offered them money right from the start because we knew that's how the system works here."
If Mrs Smoel had bothered to learn anything about Thai culture, she would have learned that they are a fiercely proud people. This angry disparagement of another country's ways, whether true or not, was hardly a sensible reaction.
Reproduced from Cutting Through blog, by Chris Champion.
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Perhaps it is in pursuit of rare and exotic bar mats - for those who already have a full set of Australian ones.
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