Office of the President
Dear Walter,
How the world is changing. The thought struck me last week, when I was delivering the Bram Fischer memorial lecture and Joel Joffe presented me with my papers from the Rivonia Trial that he has had in safe-keeping for all these years. There, among them, were my notes for my death sentence speech, the one I never had to deliver. But it was a close run thing, Walter.
Do you remember? Little Percy Yutar dribbling over his toy guillotine on the front bench, chopping off match- stick heads. I thought he was going to burst into tears when Bram told him that it was done with a rope nowadays and that, no, no matter how much he snivelled, he was not getting an invitation to the last supper. I heard recently there was a terrible row over which was heads and which was tails, when De Wet flicked the coin in the judge’s common room. But after he had tried “double-or-quits” 16 times someone pinched the coin, so tails had it and our heads were safe.
What a difference there is today. Of course I am pleased, as I am sure you are, that the Constitutional Court has banned the death penalty. But each time the 11 start gabbling on about “ubuntu” and the inalienable rights of thieves, rapists and serial killers the floodgates ease open a little further.
First it was capital punishment breaching the universal right to life. Then it was the turn of corporal punishment, Judge Pius Langa holding that it impaired the dignity of our fine, upstanding youth who had accidentally raped their grannies, or parboiled their headmasters. The state did offer to make the whippers bend over when delivering the whippings, to put them on even terms with the whipped. But Pius saw through that and made a ringing statement, which will no doubt resound down through the annals of legal history, to the effect that it is the thought that counts.
They are quite right, of course — the judges, I mean. But where will it end?
Casting an eye down the list of fundamental rights which the nation’s dignified criminals are entitled to claim, I could not help feeling uneasy. So I asked Dullah Omar to brief Cabinet on the implications. By the time he had finished I was frankly shaken.
Fourteen foreign sports writers covering the Rugby World Cup have been charged with violating citizens’ rights to free economic activity and the pursuit of their livelihoods, by resisting muggers. So far 17 482 awaiting-trial prisoners have demanded the attendance of OJ Simpson’s defence team at their trials in recognition of their right to legal representation of their choice. The Department of Land Affairs has been flooded by applications from Pretoria Central for the title deeds to their cells, in furtherance of their property rights. Any prison warder caught peeking through the little hole in a prisoner’s door faces prosecution as a Peeping Tom, for invading an inmate’s right to privacy. Several thousand offenders jailed for doing unmentionable things to dumb animals have demanded closed visits by the sheep of their choice in terms of their rights to free association. Several class actions are pending between competing groups of prisoners arguing over whether their television sets should be tuned in to Super Sport, or Sol Kerzner’s Swaziland porn channel. Johannesburg stock-brokers are queuing to put down the names of their unborn children for admission to Krugersdorp prison, such is the cachet attached to graduation from the Greg Blank Health & Racquet Club.
As we stumbled out the cabinet room, Dullah confided that a detention order had been issued for Alwyn Lombard — freed recently after serving 32 seconds of a seven year sentence for a R3-billion fraud. My heart leapt with hope; here at least was evidence I could offer our people of my determination to be tough on law and order. But Dullah added, in that mournful way of his, that the detention order had been issued under the Mental Health Act, on the basis that he must be mad wanting to be free.
Keep your doors and windows locked, old friend