Lawyers hit CA for stopping Mary Jane Veloso’s deposition

FILE – As he promised, shortly before his megafight with Floyd Mayweather Jr., Manny Pacquiao with wife Jinkee visit Filipino drug convict Mary Jane Veloso (left) on Friday in prison in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, where Veloso is detained though spared from execution last April. She’s still under death sentence. AFP

Lawyers of Mary Jane Veloso, the Filipina sentenced to death for drug trafficking in Indonesia, has expressed disappointment on the Court of Appeals’ ruling stopping the local court from getting her side of the story.

“It is with utter disappointment and unfathomable frustration to learn that the Philippine Court of Appeals, upon the instance of the recruiter’s defense, just recently issued an order restraining the long overdue deposition of convicted migrant worker Mary Jane Veloso in Indonesia,” Atty. Edre Olalia of the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers (NUPL) said in a statement.

NUPL is helping Veloso in the case against Maria Cristina Sergio and Julius Lacanilao.

He said they will exhaust all legal means so that Veloso’s side can be heard by the court.

“We shall not stop exhausting all fair legal means in combination with decisive political action to ensure that she is allowed to speak the truth, the whole truth & nothing but the truth.”

“A victim of injustice several times over, distressed migrant workers like Mary Jane expect from her compatriots not only to uphold fairness, reason and justice but also to demonstrate empathy and conscience at the very least,” Olalia said.

Veloso’s deposition was supposed to take place on April 27 at the Yogyakarta prison where she is detained.

“During the scheduled deposition, Mary Jane will answer the exhaustive written questions prepared by her Filipino private lawyers, which will be directly propounded to her by a Philippine consul with the facilitation and cooperation of Indonesian authorities,” the NUPL said.

Veloso was arrested upon her arrival in Jakarta in 2010 after her luggage yielded 2.6 kilos of heroin. She was sentenced to death later that year.

Veloso was spared by a moratorium on executions by former President Susilo Bambang Yudhiyono.

But in January 2015 after the election of President Joko Widodo, the court scheduled her execution for January 2015. She, however, earned a last-minute temporary reprieve.

Veloso maintains her innocence, insisting that she was a victim after she was tricked by Sergio and Lacanilao to bring in drugs to Indonesia.