The Murder of Wayan Mirna Salihin

A meeting at Olivier Café

On January 6, 2016, Wayan Mirna Salihin met Jessica Kumala Wongso and Hanie Boon Juwita at Olivier Café inside the Grand Indonesia shopping complex in Central Jakarta. Contemporary reporting from Indonesia's ANTARA news agency records that Wongso arrived first and ordered drinks, including a Vietnamese iced coffee that Mirna later drank.

Mirna became acutely ill soon after tasting the coffee and was taken for medical help before being transported to Abdi Waluyo Hospital, where she died. Her family reported the death as suspicious, and police began an investigation that quickly centered on the drink and the circumstances at the café.

The prosecution case and the evidentiary dispute

Investigators and prosecutors alleged that cyanide had been placed in Mirna's coffee and accused Wongso of deliberately causing her death. The prosecution presented testimony from café employees, forensic specialists and digital-evidence experts, along with CCTV footage and circumstantial evidence about the sequence of events at the table.

The case did not rest on an eyewitness who said they saw Wongso put poison into the drink. ANTARA's detailed account of the trial states that café employees did not testify to seeing her add anything to the glass. The defense also called experts who challenged the prosecution's toxicology interpretation, questioned whether the cause of death could be established without a full autopsy and disputed aspects of the CCTV analysis.

That conflict is central to understanding the case. The final legal result was a murder conviction, but the trial contained significant adversarial disagreement over how the forensic evidence should be interpreted. A responsible summary therefore separates what the courts ultimately accepted from what the defense continued to contest.

Trial and 2016 conviction

Wongso's trial began in June 2016 at the Central Jakarta District Court and drew intense national attention. Over months of hearings, prosecutors argued that the death was a planned killing, while the defense maintained that the evidence did not prove Wongso had poisoned Mirna and that alternative forensic interpretations had not been excluded.

On October 27, 2016, the court found Wongso guilty of premeditated murder under Article 340 of Indonesia's Criminal Code and imposed a 20-year prison sentence. The sentence matched the prosecution's request. Wongso and her lawyers announced that they would challenge the judgment.

Appeals and the Supreme Court record

The case proceeded through Indonesia's appellate system. In June 2017, the Supreme Court rejected Wongso's cassation challenge, leaving the 20-year sentence in place. The Supreme Court's public decision directory lists the cassation as case 498 K/PID/2017 and identifies the judgment as having permanent legal force.

Wongso later sought judicial review. The Supreme Court directory lists the first review as case 69 PK/Pid/2018, decided on December 3, 2018. That effort also failed, so the underlying conviction remained unchanged.

Parole did not erase the conviction

On August 18, 2024, Indonesia's Directorate General of Corrections announced that Wongso had been released on parole under a Ministry of Law and Human Rights decision. Parole changed her custodial status; it did not overturn the murder judgment.

ANTARA reported that parole required continued reporting and correctional supervision, with guidance obligations extending through 2032. After leaving prison, Wongso and her legal team continued to pursue a new judicial review and maintained that she had not committed the crime.

A second judicial review was rejected in 2025

On August 14, 2025, the Supreme Court rejected Wongso's second judicial-review application, decision 78 PK/PID/2025. ANTARA reported the result the following day, noting that the defense had relied on claimed new evidence and alleged judicial error. The rejection meant that Wongso continued to be legally regarded as convicted of Mirna's murder.

As of this archive's August 2026 review, the conviction has not been overturned. Because the judgment remains final despite multiple rounds of challenge, this file is classified as solved in the legal/adjudicative sense.

Why the case remains debated

The Mirna Salihin case became one of Indonesia's most discussed modern criminal trials because the legal certainty of the verdict sits alongside continuing public debate about the proof. The absence of a direct eyewitness to the alleged poisoning, the defense's challenge to the toxicology evidence and disagreement over the interpretation of video evidence have all remained part of that debate.

Those disputes do not change the current legal status, but they matter when describing the case accurately. Crime by Region therefore avoids presenting contested forensic propositions as independently established facts. The archive records the court's conclusion, the defense position and the later procedural history separately.

Timeline

Current status

The criminal judgment against Jessica Kumala Wongso remains legally valid. She is no longer incarcerated after receiving parole in 2024, but parole is not an acquittal or reversal. Wongso continues to deny killing Mirna, while the Indonesian court record continues to treat the 2016 premeditated-murder conviction as final.