Donna Nelson was arrested on January 4 at Narita Airport in Tokyo with medicine hidden in a false additional cavity in her baggage.
However the 57-year-old mentioned she was tricked into taking the suitcase by a Nigerian scammer who had groomed her for 2 years.
Since her arrest, Nelson has been in Chibu jail, about an hour outdoors of Tokyo.
She says she spends 23 hours a day caught in her cell and is simply allowed to bathe each three days. She can also be banned from chatting with different prisoners and isn’t allowed guests.
This is a typical technique utilized in Japan to attempt to drive a confession from individuals, often called “hostage justice”.
The solely individuals permitted to see Nelson are her attorneys, Australian embassy representatives and a pastor.
Her attorneys mentioned there have been many points with translation throughout her case, and it may boil right down to an inaccurate translation by a customs officer on the day of her arrest.
“The main evidence from the prosecution is mainly a customs officer who said she acted suspiciously,” Rie Nishida from Shinjuku International Law Firm informed 9News.
“There’s a lot of mistranslation that’s also the difficulty in this case.”
Part of the proof would be the messages between Nelson and the person she thought she had a romantic reference to, who turned out to be a scammer.
“Some of them were completely wrongly translated so we had to re-translate those messages and submit them back to the prosecutor,” Matthew Owens mentioned.
Ownes can also be from Shinjuku International Law Firm and is working as a translator on the case. He mentioned his shopper had a message she needed him to share.
“Donna wants to say that she is going to be able to prove her innocence, she’s 100 per cent confident of that, and she wants everyone in Australia and the world to know she is innocent.”
If she is discovered responsible, Nelson faces as much as 20 years in a Japanese jail.
Her 5 daughters and grandchildren are distraught, and mentioned they’ve proof to show she was scammed.
Source: www.9news.com.au
