Judge canes Cassie
Aussie’s plea deal rejected
“IF you have a gun to your head, are you guilty or are you innocent?”
This question from a Bogota judge sums up the challenge facing accused Australian drug mule Cassie Sainsbury, after her plea deal was sensationally rejected yesterday because she refused to take full responsibility for trying to smuggle 5.9kg of cocaine out of Colombia.
The 22-year-old Adelaide woman now faces decades in jail if she cannot prove her claims that thugs threatened to kill her family unless she agreed to carry the drugs on an Avianca flight from El Dorado Airport to London on April 12.
Sainsbury defied legal advice and her family to scuttle the plea arrangement, which was hammered out between her lawyers and the Bogota Attorney-General’s office, for her to serve just six years jail.
With good behaviour, she could have been out in half that time.
Judge Sergio Leon yesterday told Bogota Special Court 2 – which deals with narcotics cases and political prisoners – that Sainsbury’s claims meant he could not agree to the plea deal because her accepting responsibility was central to the arrangement.
At his announcement, Sainsbury’s mother Lisa Evans lurched forward in her seat and cried.
Ms Evans and Sainsbury’s fiance Scott Broadbridge had pleaded with her in the hours before court to change her stance and retract her claims of innocence.
“I can’t obligate her to make a decision. I advised her the best option was to plead guilty full stop but she was standing by her claims,” her lawyer Orlando Herran said outside court.
“Her family was all for the plea bargain, they say they prefer she goes for this. She listens to the family but she totally ignores any advice from them, she is making her own decisions and that’s why she is taking this path.”
For someone who has changed her story so many times – from drug-packed headphones as wedding gifts, to a document-run to South America through Los Angeles and a research trip on behalf of a family cleaning company that never existed – it appears a huge gamble for Sainsbury to pin her freedom on being able to prove her claims of coercion. If found guilty, she faces between 21 and 30 years in jail.