OWN CORRESPONDENT, Gaborone | Monday
SOUTH African Marietta Bosch, who has been on Death Row in Botswana for a year, will know her fate on Tuesday when a verdict is handed down in her appeal against her conviction for murder and the subsequent death sentence.
Bosch, 50, was sentenced to death in the Botswana High Court by Justice Isaac Aboagye in February last year after he had found her guilty of the murder in June 1996 of Maria Magdalene Wolmarans, her best friend and wife of the man she since married.
Bosch married Tienie Wolmarans a year after his wife had been murdered whilst she was free on bail.
She admitted bringing into Botswana, a gun-free country, the pistol with which Wolmarans was shot, but said she did so under the influence of Hennie Coetzee, general manager of Kwena Rocla, for which company Wolmarans worked as financial director.
Arguing for Bosch’s acquittal, British Queens Counsel Desmond de Silva said that the trial judge had questioned the credibility of evidence for the defence to the extent that he had shifted the burden of proof onto her and that her trial had been a miscarriage of justice.
“It was wholly illegitimate that the trial judge should have made such findings,” de Silva said. “The matter is littered, festooned, with errors. No one could say justice was seen to be done.”
De Silva also questioned the judge’s acceptance of the evidence of Coetzee, who had since left Botswana, and returned to testify under the cover of immunity against prosecution, which was not disclosed to the defence.
Bosch alleged at her trial she gave the gun to Coetzee and he had killed Wolmarans, his motive being that she was about to disclose financial irregularities at the company in which he had been involved.
Should the court uphold the death sentence, Bosch has the right of final appeal to State President Festus Mogae.
There have been 33 hangings in Botswana since independence in 1966. The most recent was on January 24 1998. In October 1999, two San who had been on Death Row for 21 months were granted a mistrial after a stay of execution only six hours before they were due to hang.