Rodrigo Gularte of Brazil, centre, is escorted by plain-clothed police officers as he is shown to the media at the Customs' office near the main airport in Jakarta, Indonesia, Thursday, Aug. 5, 2004.
BRAZILIAN prisoner Rodrigo Gularte, who suffers from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, was so unwell that he didn’t even know he was being executed.
His spiritual adviser, Catholic priest Charlie Burrows, was permitted to be with Gularte during his final moments, and has revealed Gularte’s mental state minutes before he was led to the firing squad.
The 72-year-old Irish Catholic priest told the ABC Gularte was unaware of what was happening to him.
After speaking to him about heaven in his holding cell, Mr Burrows felt he was beginning to comprehend his fate but when the Indonesian guards began placing chains around his wrist, he turned to the priest in despair.
“Oh no, oh Father, am I being executed?” he asked.
When the reality of the situation began to sink in, Gularte appeared agitated.
“He was annoyed, he didn’t get angry. The big thing was why is this happening? This is not right, I made a small mistake. Why can’t they just leave me in jail on the island?” Mr Burrows recalled.
The confused state of the 42-year-old prisoner even came as a surprise to his spiritual adviser.
“I thought I had explained to him but obviously it didn’t get through,” Mr Burrows said.
“Because he had voices and these voice told him ‘no, everything’s going to be grand’ and he believed the voices more than he did anybody else.”
ularte was arrested in 2004 with two other Brazilian couriers for bringing 6kg of cocaine into Indonesia stuffed in surfboards.
He had been treated for depression since his teenage years. When he turned to drugs, his addiction made him an easy target for Brazil’s cartels looking for people to ship cocaine to Indonesia.
That Gularte was unwell could be glimpsed by his actions when he was arrested. He told police that the two men with him had nothing to do with it and proceeded to take all the blame.
Throughout his time in Indonesian jail, Gularte continued to think he was going home.
Last year, the family hired a private doctor to assess Gularte with the report confirming his schizophrenia. This was prior to President Joko Widodo rejecting Gularte’s clemency case — and that of all other 63 people on death row for drugs — in January.
Mr Burrows said he and the family will continue to fight to prove that Gularte was mentally ill when he was both executed and arrested for the crime, and hoped to one day “clear his name”.
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