Wisni Yetty, a mother of three living in Bandung, sat in stunned silence with her head bowed when the verdict was delivered in her case.
“The defendant was legally and convincingly proven to be guilty of distributing or transmitting electronic content that violated decency,” said Judge Saptono at the Bandung courthouse yesterday, as quoted by Detik. He then sentenced Wisni to five months in jail and ordered her to pay a fine of Rp 100 million ($7,677).
The “indecent” content that the judge was referring to was a private Facebook Messenger chat that Wisni had with a friend in 2011 in which she accused her now ex-husband of domestic violence.
Wisni was found guilty of violating Indonesia’s infamous Electronic Information and Transaction Law (ITE Law), which criminalizes online defamation. The law is so ambiguously worded that even private messages between individuals can fall within its purview.
In this case, the person being defamed was Wisni’s ex-husband, Haska Etika. The two divorced in 2013 but, a year later, Haska somehow managed to hack into Wisni’s Facebook account and found the 2011 chat, which he then reported to the police in February 2014.
Wisni also reported her husband to the police for domestic violence in 2013, but prosecutors have not made any forward movement on that case.
Although Wisni’s lawyer argued that Haska should be punished for breaking into Wisni’s Facebook account, the judge rejected that argument, saying that since they had been husband and wife it was justified.
The outcome of the case is even more shocking considering the prosecutor had asked for a four-month sentence, but the judge decided to punish her with five months instead.
Later, on the courthouse steps, Wisni cried as she talked to the gathered reporters and implied that the verdict may have been rigged.
“We do not believe this. This is a game. Haska’s family already knew the outcome before the decision was delivered,” she said, as quoted by Tempo.
She said the defamation case was in retaliation for her reporting Haska to the police for domestic violence. She also said her ex accurately predicted what the verdict would be long before the trial was over.
Rushdi A. Bakar, Wisni’s lawyer, said he would soon file an appeal against the verdict, saying there were many irregularities in the trial and that the judge did not take into account the facts presented in court.
Indonesia’s ITE Law has been heavily criticized for being both ambiguously worded and overly harsh (it allows violators to be sentenced with up to 6 years in jail), opening the door to several cases with disturbing implications for freedom of speech in the country.
On the same day Wisni received her sentence, a verdict was rendered in another ITE case. Florence Sihombing, a post-graduate student, first got into legal trouble after she she posted a message on the social network Path in which she called the city of Yogyakarta “poor, stupid and uncultured.”
Angry Yogyakarta residents reported Florence to the police for violating the ITE law, saying she had defamed the city. The Yogyakarta court agreed, sentencing her to a 6-month probation period or two months in jail, as well as a fine of Rp 10 million ($765).
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