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Miranda gets out of prison, in style
Miranda Goeltom - Antara/Reno EsnirFormer Bank Indonesia (BI) senior deputy governor Miranda Goeltom walked free from prison on Tuesday after serving a full three-year sentence at the Tangerang Womenâs Penitentiary for her role in a high-profile bribery case
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Miranda Goeltom - Antara/Reno Esnir
Former Bank Indonesia (BI) senior deputy governor Miranda Goeltom walked free from prison on Tuesday after serving a full three-year sentence at the Tangerang Women's Penitentiary for her role in a high-profile bribery case.
Miranda, who was also known as a member of the capital's tight-knit socialite circle, was released at 7:30 a.m. on Tuesday. She was not granted any sentence reductions during her time in prison.
'While serving her sentence, she never received a sentence cut,' Akbar Hadi, a spokesperson for the Law and Human Rights Ministry's Directorate General for Correctional Institutions, told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.
Miranda, a professor of monetary economics at the University of Indonesia, was detained in June 2012 by the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) and sentenced to three years in prison in September 2012 by the Jakarta Corruption Court for bribing lawmakers to elect her as senior deputy governor at the central bank in 2004. In April 2013, the Supreme Court rejected her cassation appeal and upheld her three-year prison sentence instead.
Later on Tuesday after leaving the prison, Miranda, along with family members, visited the GPIB Paulus Church in Menteng, Central Jakarta, to give thanks for her release.
Miranda deemed her three-year imprisonment as a stage of life that she needed to face and she saw her release as a graduation.
'I have passed the university of life although many [things] I still have not understood,' she said. 'We were crushed but we remained tough and survived. May God give me strength so that I can now live my life with joy,' Miranda told reporters.
In her first appearance as a graft defendant at the Jakarta Corruption Court in July 2012, Miranda stole the spotlight for looking stylish, wearing the mandatory KPK defendants' shirt with the collar turned up and a grey skirt.
With her dyed red hair, Miranda's outfit looked more suited to a night at a classical music concert than a graft trial hearing.
On Tuesday during the church service, Miranda wore a similar look, donning a fitted white dress.
Her lightly dyed hair had the same signature coiffed style that she wore three years ago, before being sent to prison.
During her trial in 2012, Miranda denied any charges leveled against her and maintained that she was innocent. She cited famous quotes from figures like Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, Jr. in her defense plea.
A month before her first trial hearing, when she was named a suspect and was being detained at the KPK detention center, Miranda received many bouquets from friends and family members wishing her a happy birthday.
However, she later appeared stunned by the guilty verdict handed down to her in September 2012.
Twenty-eight lawmakers were convicted for accepting bribes in the form of traveler's checks worth a total of Rp 20.85 billion (US$1.57 million) through businesswoman Nunun Nurbaeti, who was sentenced to two years and six months in prison for her role in the case.
The court found that a number of separate meetings held by Miranda with some of the lawmakers at the Dharmawangsa Hotel and the Graha Niaga building before a 'fit-and-proper' BI senior deputy governor test in 2004 were related to the bribery plot.
Despite Miranda's verdict, court proceedings failed to discover who was behind the plot and who supplied Nunun with the traveler's checks to bribe lawmakers to vote for Miranda. Antigraft activists had pushed the KPK to uncover those who were behind Miranda's bribery case.
