2015 Execution in Indonesia
Zainal Abidin
Indonesia
1965-April 29, 2015
In 2000, Abidin was arrested for possession of 58.7kgs of cannabis at his home in Palembang, South Sumatra. Upon his arrest he was beaten so badly by police that he nearly ended up with a disability.
In 2001, Abidin was sentenced to 15 years in prison. The prosecutors appealed this sentence and the supreme court sentenced him to the death penalty. The two men who Abidin claims owned the cannabis and had brought it to his house, pretending it was bags of rice, have since been released from prison.
In 2005, he applied for a judicial review of his case claiming he was just a labourer at the time of his arrest and could therefore not afford to buy that amount of marijuana. The documents for his appeal went missing and the court did not respond to the request for review until ten years after it was filed. In January 2015, the courts denied his appeal.
During the early hours of April 29, 2015, Abidin was executed along with seven other drug criminals on the prison island of Nusakambangan.
He is survived by his daughter, who was only one month old at the time of his arrest.