Second single mother sentenced to death for 40 pounds of pot in Malaysia

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A Thai woman caught with nearly 40 pounds of pot in a bus station in Sungai Petani last February will be hung for her “crime” according to Malaysian English-language news site, The Star.
Thitapah Charoenchuea, a 26-year-old single mother of a ten-year-old daughter, has maintained that she is was framed and that this was someone else’s drug deal gone wrong. She says that a man she only knew as “Ali” approached her before she boarded a bus after a brief stop on a bus from Changlun to Kuala Lumpur and asked Thitapah to take care of his bags and he would meet her in Kuala Lumpur.


Ali never showed up, and Thitapah was busted with 20 “slabs” of cannabis, according to The Star. The judge in the case said her defense “failed to cast doubt on the case presented by the prosecution” and that the fact that the woman bought two padlocks to lock up the bags before getting on the bus in Changlun.
The judge didn’t think that Thitapah was telling the truth and she received the draconian sentence of being lynched.
Here’s the messed up part: a nearly identical situation occurred in 2011 and the woman sentenced to death for smuggling herb, Thitma Khongnun, told an eerily-similar tale.
Thitma, a 30-year-old mother of two, said she was boarding a bus near Changlun to Kuala Lumpur in October of 2011 when a man named “Adi” approached her and gave her a bag to carry. She was busted on the bus in Jitra, Malaysia by customs officials and sentenced to death this past July.
So, to recap: single mothers, on the bus alone, a man named Ali/Adi that the women don’t describe, roughly 40 pounds of pot both times and the destination of Kuala Lumpur is the same in both stories.
Either one or both of those stories are just morbid fakes, or someone in the Malaysian court system is clearly ignoring a pattern of exploited women for the sake of an easy trial that ends with the death of yet another a human being over a plant.
It wouldn’t surprise us it if was the latter given that Malaysia is no stranger to killing people for selling cannabis, as Toke correspondent Jack Daniel wrote about in June.
The country has a mandatory death penalty for all drug traffickers. Anyone caught with more than 200 grams of herb is automatically considered a dealer.

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