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| Hong Kong Customs photo of the leggings and underpants that concealed the nearly 2-kilo cocaine trafficked by Cumpio. |
Susan B. Cumpio, a widowed former domestic helper, could have received a full discount for pleading guilty but High Court judge Kevin Zervos decided she did not fully cooperate with customs investigators.
The sentencing was delayed for six months as Zervos ordered the prosecution to review the case after Cumpio raised questions about the facts after she pleaded guilty to trafficking in a dangerous drug on Nov 27 last year.
As a result, the officers who processed and interrogated Cumpio after her arrest on July 15, 2015, were called to give evidence in court on May 18.
Cumpio was finally scheduled for sentencing on May 23, but the court debated she was entitled to the full one-third discount for pleading guilty.
“I analyzed the evidence given by the two Customs officers on May 18 and I accepted their evidence… I concluded that the defendant had not cooperated with the investigators,” the judge said.
Zervos said that during the preliminary enquiry, Cumpio said she was meant to deliver the 1,994 grams of nearly pure cocaine, valued at $2.2 million, to Manila, not Hong Kong.
But during a hearing on May 10, Cumpio told the High Court that the officers ignored information she was giving them about a man waiting outside the airport terminal to pick up the cocaine she was carrying.
She said she tried to give investigators a sheet of paper on which the code name and phone number of the Hong Kong contact was written. She asked the officers to let her call the contact’s number, but they told her to keep quiet.
She also denied the prosecution’s claim that she was uncooperative during investigation.
Zervos said Cumpio should have earned an extra discount if she cooperated, “but the defendant was disbelieved after a full day of hearing…(and) she did not show remorse.”
As the judge, he said, he was entitled to reduce the discount following a guilty plea.
The judge said he considered the “very large quantity” of the cocaine that Cumpio brought into Hong Kong from Brazil and its international element in deciding on the sentence.
Cumpio was arrested on July 15 last year when she arrived from Sao Paulo, Brazil, via Dubai, and attracted the attention of Customs officers with her unnatural gait.
A search yielded nearly two kilograms of suspected cocaine wrapped around her thighs and concealed in her tailor-made underwear.
In mitigation, defense counsel Richard Donald said Cumpio was widowed in 2005, and supported a son, now 17, and her parents back in the Philippines.
She was as a shopkeeper and restaurant waitress before she worked as a domestic helper in Singapore, then in Malaysia and Hong Kong.
She next worked in São Paulo where, after two years, she met an African man. They fell in love with each other and “spent good times together” until the man lost his job. He began to take drugs and became abusive, beating her up often.
Eventually the man told her about his being in the drugs business and offered her passage back to the Philippines if she agreed to make a trip to Hong Kong to deliver drugs.
Cumpio accepted the offer, she said, because she wanted to see her family and but vowed never to return to Brazil.
