Sydney grandmother Maria Elvira Pinto Exposto has won her appeal against a death sentence for drug trafficking in Malaysia and will be freed after nearly five years in jail and 18 months on death row.

Her appeal for trafficking more than 1kg of crystal methamphetamine, also known as ice, through Kuala Lumpur airport in December 2014, was heard in Malaysia’s court of final appeal on Tuesday.

Chief justice of Malaysia Tengku Maimun Binti Tuan Mat delivered the finding, overturning her conviction and ordering her release. Exposto was led from the court still shackled.

Exposto’s long-running case had won global sympathy after judges heard how she was set up through a love scam online.

The 55-year-old grandmother from Cabramatta West in Sydney was initially found not guilty in a lower court after it heard how she was set up in an online boyfriend scam by a man who identified himself as “Captain Daniel Smith”, a US soldier stationed in Afghanistan.

They arranged to meet in Shanghai, where he claimed he was to lodge documents for his retirement from the military, but he never turned up.

Instead, Exposto was befriended by a stranger. She testified that he had asked her to take a black backpack, which she thought contained only clothes, to Melbourne.

During a stopover in Kuala Lumpur customs officers noticed irregular stitching inside the backpack and found packages of ice hidden inside the lining of the bag.

She was charged, and while the lower court initially believed she had been an unwitting drug mule, prosecutors appealed and won and she was sentenced to death early last year.

Her final appeal against that sentence had been complicated by changes in laws governing executions.

There is currently a moratorium on the use of the death penalty in Malaysia as legislation is pending that will remove mandatory death penalties for traffickers and give judges greater discretion in sentencing.

Exposto’s lawyer Muhammad Shafee Abdullah told the court of final appeal on Tuesday that his client was so naive about drugs that when customs officers told her they’d found ice in the bag she was carrying she said it couldn’t be because “it would have melted”. He’d earlier described her conviction as “perverse”.

But prosecutors argued “love sickness” was not a defence for drug trafficking and she could not appeal to naiveté. “Ignorance is not a defence.”

Following the quashing of her conviction, Exposto said in a statement: “I thank God and my lawyers for my freedom after almost five painful years in jail”.

Her son, Hugo Pinto Exposto, told reporters outside court she had missed “a lot of precious moments”.



“It’ll be overwhelming for her to come back home. All I want to do is just take her home, take her away, and just catch her up on all the things she’s missed.”

Harsh and mandatory penalties for drug trafficking were introduced in south-east Asia after intense lobbying by the United States amid its war on drugs and a strategy to curb heroine and opium smuggling out of the notorious Golden Triangle in the 1970s and 1980s.

Among those caught in the crackdown on narcotics were Australian drug traffickers Kevin Barlow and Brian Chambers, who became the first westerners sent to the Malaysian gallows, in 1986.

Australian Associated Press contributed to this report