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DEATH PENALTY
Pregnant Woman Escapes Execution in Vietnam
By Tran Dinh Thanh Lam
HO CHI MINH CITY, Oct 30, 2006 (IPS) - A 39-year-old woman being held in solitary confinement for six months will not be executed because she has become pregnant, the woman's lawyers confirmed.
"We can say for sure that according to Vietnam's current law, Nguyen Thi Oanh will escape the death penalty," Pham Hong Hai, director of the law
firm Pham Hong Hai & Associates, told IPS. Hai's firm represents Oanh.
On Apr. 28 the Supreme Court of Vietnam sentenced Oanh to stand before a firing squad for smuggling one billion dong (62,500 U.S. dollars) worth of heroin from the mountainous border province of Hoa Binh to the capital, Hanoi.
Five months later, however, Nguyen Hong Bach, another lawyer at Pham Hong Hai & Associates, informed the court that Oanh was pregnant and asked to have her death sentence reconsidered.
Doctors confirmed on Sep. 25 that Oanh, who was being held in solitary confinement, was 11 weeks pregnant. At that time, her husband was serving a jail sentence at another prison in another province for heroin smuggling.
The case, seen as unique in Vietnam, has stirred the public's attention. Hai hinted of "the possibility that she was raped." Others suspect a Machiavellian scheme on Oanh's part, saying she created life to avoid death, and that she bribed the guards.
"There is no way a woman under death penalty can get pregnant, unless some prison guards were directly or indirectly involved," Commander Nguyen Quoc Trinh, deputy director of Ha Nam Prison, told IPS. Regardless of how she became pregnant, the fact that she is has saved her life.
On Oct. 12, police expelled two officers who guarded Oanh and arrested them for "abuse of power." At the same time, the police said the father of Oanh's unborn baby was a young prisoner in charge of cleaning Oanh's cell and delivering her food.
According to Commander Trinh, prison life in Vietnam is harsh, and vigilance should be high on death row. "All provisions are set to prevent evasion and rape," Trinh said, adding that condemned prisoners are kept in solitary cells no larger than nine square metres.
Death row inmates are allowed to meet with family members once a month. They only have daily contact with "volunteers," inmates with short prison terms and good behaviour who are in charge of cleaning cells and distributing food.
"In principle, only a prisoner of the same sex (as the death row inmate) could become a volunteer. Prison guards will examine whatever the volunteer is carrying before letting him enter the cell. They also must keep their eyes on what's going on in the cell," Trinh said. It would be impossible for Oanh to become pregnant unless the guards cooperated in some way, he added.
Reliable sources say the People's Court of Hoa Binh has already asked the Supreme Court to help solve Oanh's case, while Hoa Binh Police continue to investigate how Oanh become pregnant.
Police said Oanh confessed she had "seduced" the young inmate. The young prisoner, in turned, confessed he "felt sorry for Oanh and wanted to console
her." The two also said they had sex many times, police reported.
Not everyone is satisfied with the police's official explanation. Hai, one of Oanh's lawyer's, said she may have been forced to make such a confession.
"The law in Vietnam has no article regulating the case (of female prisoner getting pregnant to evade death penalty)," Hai told IPS. "If she said she
was raped, the 'author' (of the crime) would be condemned; but if she said she had agreed (to having sex) the law could do nothing against him."
When asked whether he believes Oanh was raped, her other lawyer, Bach, said he was "more interested in the outcome of Oanh's pregnancy than in the
reason of it."
According to Vietnamese law, the death sentence cannot be applied to pregnant women or women with children under the age of three at the time of
crime or the trial.
Under the nation's rules, the baby will be delivered in the prison health centre and will be allowed to stay with its mother until age three, after breast-feeding has finished. After that, the mother can decide whether to keep the child with her or have the child looked after outside, according to German press reports.
Trafficking more than 600 grams of heroin in Vietnam is punishable by death or life imprisonment. The death penalty for drug-related offences was introduced in December 1992, because the country saw it as a necessity to combat crime.
The United Nations and other human rights organisations, however, criticise Vietnam's justice system, claiming it is corrupt and falls short in fairness. They urge the government to stop executing people on drugs charges. Some rights groups say if a country insists on capital punishment, it must be issued only in cases of murder or treason. At least one-third of all death sentences recorded by Amnesty International are for drug-related crimes.
Vietnamese media also reported that Oanh is not the only woman to escape the death penalty through pregnancy. VietnamNet on Oct. 13 reported that Tran Thi Huong, another female on death row, in Chi Hoa prison, had her sentence commuted from death to life in prison after delivering a child in June.
Initial investigations found that a male prisoner in the cell next to Huong transferred his sperm into a phial and handed it to her through a valve between their two cells.
Nguyen Thanh Minh, a law expert in Ho Chi Minh City, commented: "Huong's success may have inspired Oanh, or at least someone who tipped her off."
Minh told IPS, "Oanh waited for almost three months (so as to be certain of her pregnancy) before asking her sister to announce it to her lawyer; and the latter only needs to submit his petition. Decidedly, everything has been planned beforehand."
Dr. Nguyen Thi Ngoc Phuong, former director of Tu Du Hospital and a renowned social activist, told IPS that it was the first time he had heard of women intentionally getting pregnant to avoid death.
"I'm not interested in finding out whether these women have planned their scheme or not. I'm interested in what the law is going to do to these unfortunate women," Dr. Phuong said.
(END)
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