Indonesia Executes Convicted Brazilian National

Indonesian authorities today executed eight convicted drug smugglers including Rodrigo Gularte of Brazil despite an outcry from international governments and human rights groups.

The 42-year-old was shot by a firing squad at around midnight local time along with seven other convicts from Nigeria, Australia, Brazil and Indonesia. A Philippine woman was reportedly the only inmate spared from the execution that was scheduled last Saturday and confirmed by prison officials earlier today.

Gularte was one of three men detained in July 2004 at a Jakarta airport with approximately thirteen pounds of cocaine hidden inside of surfboards. He took the blame for the incident and was subsequently sentenced to death while his companions were let free.

Angelita Muxfeldt, Gularte’s cousin, believe that his mental state has been hammered by drug addiction and depression. She feels criminals exploited this and led him to commit what she called “his biggest mistake.”

Gularte was in a weakened state of health in the days leading to his execution while a last-minute appeal from Gularte’s lawyers was rebuffed. Attorneys argued in 2014 that their client suffered from schizophrenia and were hoping that his sentence would be commuted since its illegal to apply the depth penalty to prisoners with mental disorders in Indonesia. Meanwhile, an evaluation in March requested by Indonesia's prosecutor-general has purportedly not been released.

“The Brazilian is in a very deteriorated psychiatric state. He keeps affirming that it will not happen. At the same time he asks for the procedures to be sped up, that everything happens quickly,” said an anonymous Brazilian diplomatic official.

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Online Sources – Red Cross; BBC News; Reuters; Bloomberg

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Image – Ivan Sekretarev/Associated Press via CBC (“A wounded blast victim is moved on a stretcher at Domodedovo airport in Moscow on Jan. 24, 2011.”)
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Image – CBC (“The brain is not immune to the long-term consequences of smoking two packs of cigarettes per day, the researchers found. (Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press).“)
Online Sources- MSNBC, Al Jazeera English, Reuters, CNN

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Image – Christian Science Monitor (“The winners of the 2010 Nobel Prize for chemistry are announced Wednesday in Stockholm, Sweden: Richard Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi, and Akira Suzuki.”)
Online Sources- MSNBC, CNN, The Guardian, Al Jazeera English

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