The world never loses its fascination for a young white middle-class woman on Death Row. It seems to defy nature. Sandra Gregory certainly got the same feeling when she learned of her sentence, emerging from the court in Bangkok after a stressful 3-year wait in prison. The shock on her face was the defining moment of this video. "I never lied!" was all she could cry through the bars of the armoured van, "I never lied!". This was her protest about the unfair outcome - the freeing of the young Englishman, Robert Lock, who had got her into drug smuggling in the first place.
Yet it was all so unnecessary, as she admitted herself. It was a dose of Dengue Fever (worse than malaria, at some stages) that had interrupted her teaching career, leaving her unable to afford her ticket home. There were, in fact, plenty of options for raising the necessary funds. But she chose the lazy one, when she was offered a thousand pounds to take a small package to Tokyo.
Just a few little jewels, he told her. Yeah, sure. On one level, she knew full well it was Class A, probably heroin. But Lock was beckoning her into hippie-paradise, with its hazy boundaries, where it would sound uncool ("fascist") to say no...
Gregory notes the irony that Lock was not even a man she liked very much, certainly not her lover. We're probably not allowed to speculate on how he was allowed to walk free, as he's presumably (undeservedly) still alive and able to sue. Today she's giving lectures in schools about the dangers of drug-dealing. That's usually called "I've had my fun, you can't have yours." But nobody ever got less fun out of the drugs game than Sandra Gregory.
