BARRY BAXTER, Gaborone | Thursday
FIVE foreign judges will decide this month whether to hang a South African woman who is on death row in Botswana for a love-triangle murder.
Marietta Bosch, 49, was sentenced to death in the Botswana High Court in February last year for the June 1996 murder of Maria Wolmarans, her best friend and wife of the man she has since married.
Five of Botswana’s eight Appeal Court judges will begin hearing an appeal against her conviction on January 10 but they are not expected to give a ruling immediately.
If the sentence is carried out, Bosch will be the first person to hang in Botswana in three years.
In a provision put in place when the former Bechuanaland Protectorate became independent Botswana in 1966, the Appeal Court comprises judges from England, Scotland, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Nigeria.
Current members of the Appeal Court, which sits twice a year in January and July, include Judge President Austin Ammisah and Sir John Blufeld from England and Lord Weir of Scotland.
Local Judge Isaac Aboagye said in his ruling last year that Bosch had conspired to kill her best friend and her rival for the affections of Tienie Wolmarans.
”The crime was carefully planned with the motive of enabling you to take over the husband of the deceased. You desired to eliminate the deceased in order to be able to marry her husband. I have no doubt the crime was premeditated,” he said.
The judge dismissed evidence of psychiatrist Dr Louise Olivier that Bosch did not have a killer’s profile and could not lie.
Asking her if she had anything to say before he passed sentence, Bosch replied: ”I am not guilty. You are, My Lord, sentencing a woman for something she did not do.”
Bosch admitted to the court that she had brought the gun with which Wolmarans was shot into Botswana, a country which rarely licenses private firearms, but said she did so for her boss at a local company.
She said her boss shot Wolmarans on the eve of a company audit because she was about to disclose financial irregularities in which he had been involved.
Defence lawyers say they will base their appeal on an immunity deal that allowed Bosch’s former boss to testify at her trial.
The hearing is planned for three days to January 12, but Bosch is unlikely to know her fate until later in the month. – Reuters