Voices Beyond Verdicts

On 29 April 2015, Mary Jane Veloso came within an hour of execution by firing squad in Indonesia when she was suddenly granted a reprieve. More than a decade later, following bilateral negotiations that led to her repatriation to the Philippines in 2024, Mary Jane continues to be incarcerated in her home country—despite never having been convicted of any crime there. A former migrant domestic worker, Mary Jane was arrested in Indonesia in 2010 when a suitcase she’d been given to carry into the country was found to have heroin hidden in its lining. She was convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to death later that same year, after a trial conducted in a language she couldn’t understand or follow. Her experience—her family’s struggle with poverty, the push to venture abroad in search of work, her vulnerability to exploitation and manipulation—highlights a harsh, alarming reality: that, in many cases around the world, the women accused of being drug traffickers are themselves victims of trafficking. In the second episode of Voices Beyond Verdicts, we tell the story of Mary Jane Veloso, speaking with Yuni Asriyanti of Komnas Perempuan in Indonesia and Edre Olalia of the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers in the Philippines about the need for total abolition of the death penalty in Indonesia and ongoing efforts to secure Mary Jane’s freedom, once and for all. This episode was produced in partnership with the Coalition Against the Death Penalty (CADP) in the Philippines.

Although they started from similar positions, Singapore and Malaysia have taken dramatically different paths in their use of the death penalty over the past 15 years. While Malaysia has reduced its use of capital punishment, Singapore has only doubled down on its implementation of executions.  In this episode, Kirsten Han from Singapore and Ngeow Chow Ying from Malaysia—two anti-death penalty activists and ADPAN members—reflect on the pivotal moments that shaped their countries' shifting stances, and the challenges they continue to face in the ongoing fight for abolition.