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Sandra Gregory (born 1965) is a British teacher who was imprisoned for four years in Thailand after being caught trying to smuggle heroin out of Bangkok's Don Muang Airport. She was then transferred to a UK prison for three years, before being pardoned by the King of Thailand. Gregory has since earned an Oxford degree and published her memoirs.
Gregory had spent two years travelling around Thailand and living in Bangkok, sometimes working as an English language teacher. [1] Suffering a bout of dengue fever, Gregory was unable to work; her money was running out and she was desperate to return to the UK. [2] She met and became friends with Robert Lock from her home country. She claims that soon after they met, he made her a proposal, "Come to Tokyo with me and if you hide my drugs on your person, I will give you £1000." Gregory agreed to carry Lock's 89 grams of heroin, for his personal use, from Bangkok to Tokyo. [1]
On arrival together at Bangkok's Don Muang Airport on 3 February 1993, Lock, his girlfriend Ruth, and Gregory were detained after a tip-off about Lock. While security personnel interviewed Lock, Gregory was also observed to be nervous. All three were searched and x-rayed. Gregory was the only person carrying illegal items; the drugs hidden inside her body were detected. Lock and Gregory were arrested; the girlfriend was released. Gregory was held at the Lard Yao Women's section within Bangkok's Klong Prem Central Prison, notorious for its brutality, drug abuse, squalid conditions and severe overcrowding. She befriended other foreign prisoners Karyn Smith from the UK, and Australian Nola Blake.
Gregory spent three years at Lard Yao before being convicted. In court she entered a guilty plea to possession and attempting to smuggle heroin out of Thailand. She was carrying 89 grams; it is standard procedure in Thailand to give the death sentence to those smuggling more than 100 grams of heroin. Lock pleaded not guilty; he was found not guilty by the courts and released. Gregory was found guilty and was sentenced to death. [3] This was subsequently reduced to life imprisonment, then downgraded further to 25 years the same day.
After spending four years in Lard Yao, Gregory was transferred at her choice to Britain in 1997 to complete the remainder of her sentence (21 years). She found she was imprisoned in maximum security prisons there: in the UK prisoners were classified by the length of their sentence [2] despite the fact that in the UK, trafficking would have attracted a much shorter sentence. In one letter to her parents she said "I wish I had stayed in Thailand". She spent hours confined to her cell in England. In Lard Yao, prisoners had the freedom to roam around the prison and the grounds. She claimed to be “happy” in Lard Yao, as she could see the blue sky and the green trees in the prison garden.
After years of campaigning by her parents for her release, the King of Thailand granted Gregory a Royal Pardon and she was released on 20 July 2000. [4] She wrote a book about her experiences, titled Forget You Had a Daughter. It was released as a hardback in 2002 by Vision. The paperback edition was published in 2004 by Vision Paperbacks.
A few weeks after being released from prison, Gregory applied to Oxford University. [5] She started studying geography as a mature student at Harris Manchester College in 2002. [6] Prior to attending Oxford, she took a year out to tour schools and talk about her experiences in the hopes of dissuading others from making the same mistakes she did.
She said in 2001, "I thought my CV looks blotchy, I've got a criminal record and I'm not part of mainstream society so I'll not get a place. But I did and I found that the college I had applied to takes people on their individual merits. They accept a diversity of students who have something to offer." [7]
Gregory said in 2004 that the scenes in the novel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and its film adaptation involving the Thai prison probably received inspiration from her incident since author Helen Fielding knew the next door neighbours of her parents and presumably would have talked to them. [8]
Gregory appeared in the 2006 British documentary series Banged Up Abroad where she talked about the experience. [9]
Bangkok Hilton is a three-part Australian mini-series made in 1989 by Kennedy Miller Productions and directed by Ken Cameron. The title of the mini-series is the nickname of a fictional Bangkok prison in which the main protagonist is imprisoned, a mordant reference to Hanoi Hilton, the nickname for a prison used by North Vietnam during the Vietnam War.
Warren Fellows is an Australian former drug courier who was sentenced to life imprisonment in Thailand in 1978 for his role in a heroin trafficking operation that took place from Perth to Bangkok. In his best-selling book The Damage Done, Fellows describes the violence and harsh conditions he experienced in Thailand prisons.
Brokedown Palace is a 1999 American drama film directed by Jonathan Kaplan, and starring Claire Danes, Kate Beckinsale, and Bill Pullman. It deals with two American friends imprisoned in Thailand for alleged drug smuggling. Its title is taken from a Grateful Dead song written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter from their 1970 album American Beauty.
Capital punishment in Singapore is a legal penalty. Executions in Singapore are carried out by long drop hanging, and usually take place at dawn. Thirty-three offences—including murder, drug trafficking, terrorism, use of firearms and kidnapping—warrant the death penalty under Singapore law.
Paul Cecil Hayward was a professional rugby league footballer who played for the Newtown Jets between 1973 and 1978.
Frank Lucas was an American drug lord who operated in Harlem, New York City, during the late 1960s and early 1970s. He was known for cutting out middlemen in the drug trade and buying heroin directly from his source in the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia. Lucas boasted that he smuggled heroin using the coffins of dead American servicemen, as depicted in the feature film American Gangster (2007), which fictionalized aspects of his life. This claim was denied by his Southeast Asian associate Leslie "Ike" Atkinson.
Capital punishment is a legal penalty in Malaysian law.
Banged Up Abroad is a British documentary/docudrama television series created by Bart Layton that was produced for Channel 5 and that premiered in March 2006. Most episodes feature stories of people who have been arrested while travelling abroad, usually for trying to smuggle illegal drugs, although some episodes feature people who were either kidnapped or captured while they were either travelling or living in other countries. Some episodes have featured real-life stories that first became well known when they were made the subject of a film: films that have been 're-made' in this way include Midnight Express, Goodfellas, The Devil's Double, Argo, Mr Nice and, to a lesser extent, Casino. A few episodes have focused on undercover infiltrations of criminal syndicates by law enforcement agents or individuals recruited by them.
Patricia Ann Cahill and KarynJoanne Smith are an English pair of convicted drug smugglers, having been arrested, charged and found guilty of attempting to smuggle nearly 26 kilos of heroin out of Thailand in July 1990.
Leslie "Ike" Atkinson was a US Army master sergeant and convicted drug trafficker. He is believed to have been a major figure in smuggling heroin into the United States from Southeast Asia from about 1968 to 1975.
Klong Prem Central prison is a maximum security prison in Chatuchak District, Bangkok, Thailand. The prison has several separate sections. The compound houses up to 20,000 inmates. Within the perimeter of the compound are the Women's Central Prison, often referred to as "Lat Yao" or "Lat Yao women's prison". There is the Central Correction Institution for Drug Addicts, Bangkok Special Prison, and the Central Correctional Hospital. The Lat Yao men's section takes custody of male offenders whose sentence term is not over 25 years. As of 2002 the men's section held 1,158 foreigners from 56 countries out of a total of 7,218 prisoners. It is a part of the Thai Department of Corrections.
David McMillan is a British-Australian former drug smuggler who is the only Westerner on record as having successfully escaped Bangkok's Klong Prem prison. His exploits were detailed in several books and in the 2011 Australian telemovie Underbelly Files: The Man Who Got Away.
Harry Nicolaides is an Australian writer of Greek-Cypriot origin who was imprisoned in Thailand under the Thai lèse majesté law, for a passage in a 2005 novel that was alleged to have defamed the Thai monarchy. On 19 January 2009, he was sentenced to three years in prison and was provisionally pardoned on 21 February, after having spent six months in a Thai prison.
Nola Blake is an Australian woman who in 1987 was arrested in Bangkok, Thailand for drug trafficking and subsequently sentenced to death. Her sentence was later commuted to life in prison. Blake resided in Botany, New South Wales and was aged 35 when she was arrested.
Phonthong Prison, known as the "Foreigners Prison", is a mixed gender prison near Vientiane, Laos. The prison is used to hold non-Laotian prisoners.
Eliadah "Lia" McCord is an American woman who was convicted of smuggling heroin in Bangladesh at the age of 18. She was subsequently sentenced to life in prison, but was pardoned after four years and six months at the request of Congressman Bill Richardson. McCord's story was documented on Raw TV's Banged Up Abroad
Samantha Orobator is a British drug trafficker whose trial had international repercussions. She was arrested in Laos in August 2008, found guilty and sentence to for life to Phonthong Prison. Her case attracted popular media attention because she was found to be pregnant after being taken to prison.
Béatrice Saubin was a French woman convicted of drug smuggling in Malaysia who later wrote a best-selling book about her prison experiences. Raised by her grandmother in Romilly-sur-Seine, she dropped out of high school and travelled to Thailand, then Malaysia, having affairs with men in each country. Her Malaysian lover in Penang offered to marry her if she met him in Zürich. At age 20, in January 1980, she was detained at Penang International Airport when an airport x-ray scanner detected 534 grams (1.177 lb) of pure grade heroin hidden in her suitcase.
Sim Ah Cheoh was a Singaporean drug trafficker of Chinese descent. She was originally sentenced to death in 1988 for the crime, for which she was arrested in 1985, and Sim's two accomplices Lim Joo Yin and Ronald Tan Chong Ngee were also arrested and received the same sentence, and like Sim, both also lost their appeals against their sentence. Subsequently, while Lim and Tan were executed on 3 April 1992, Sim was granted clemency and her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, making her the fourth person since 1959, as well as the second female and second drug convict on death row to be pardoned from execution by the President of Singapore.
Lau Chi Sing was a 23 year old male Hong Kong national executed in Singapore for drug trafficking. He was the first Hongkonger to be executed in Singapore since its independence and also the first drug mule to be sentenced to death for trafficking narcotics via Changi Airport.
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