Keith Brown - UPDATE

Keith Brown was just travelling through Dubai with his family when he got pulled aside and searched. The only thing found on him was a cigarette bud stuck to the bottom of his shoe which proved to contain 0.003g of cannabis. An amount so small it weighs less than a grain of sugar.

Sentence: 4 years

Around the 25th of February, the Prince appointed an heir and on that occasion released 216 prisoners one of which was Keith Brown. All the best to him, he was robbed of 5 months of his life. Read the news story here.

An unnamed Swiss national

A Swiss national was found with three poppy seeds on his clothes from a bread roll he ate at heathrow airport. Poppy seeds are considered an opiate in UAE and as such he was arrested and conviced of drug smuggling.

Sentence: 4 years

Tracy Wilkinson

Tracy Wilkinson had an emergency injection of Codeine whilst in Dubai to help reduce her back pain. She got arrested at the airport and ended up spending 2 months in a Dubai prison.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/southern_counties/4200952.stm

Dallas Austin

One of the very high profile cases in 2006 was that of Dallas Austin. He was caught in possession of roughly one gram of Cocaine and his urine tested positive for drugs. Although Austin was clearly gulty of carrying drugs there are a couple of interesting points about his case.

1) he waited 1 month to be sentenced.
It seems to be a standard amount of time. We are expecting cat's test results back on Monday the 11th at which point he will have been held for 16 days. Hopefully if the test results come back clear he should be released immediately. In any other case, chances are it will take another 2 weeks for a court date to be given.

2) he was deported on the day of his sentencing. The same day he got sentenced to 4 years in prison, he got deported back to the states. Apparently a senator in the states had the right connections and with a couple of phone calls (and several very good lawyers) managed to get an immediate royla pardon Austin Dallas went straight onto a plain back to the states. The case received a lot of mixed reactions. Clearly nobody wanted Austin Dallas to have to go to prison in Dubai but on the other hand it seemed rather unfair that if you could afford the best lawyers and had the right connections that would get you out of a jail sentence. I guess the conclusion is: he shouldn's have to serve 4 years for what he did but neither should anyone else.

To read more about the Austin Dallas case please use the link on the right hand side.