Glenda Daniels
The Office of the President is expecting the first application for a presidential pardon for a woman who killed her abusive husband. The application is currently with the Department of Justice.
Four more applications will reach the president’s office in the next few months.
Should these applications be successful, it would set a precedent in South Africa for women who have been treated harshly by a justice system that does not take their abuse into account.
The five women deserve sentences more lenient than the 15 to 21 years meted out to them, according to the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR), which recently launched the Justice for Women Campaign.
The centre is asking Mbeki to use his constitutional powers to grant the women an early release, within the context of the Domestic Violence Act of 1999. The first application for a pardon was handed to the Department of Justice three weeks ago.
“The Department of Justice has received the 400-page application for pardon and will consider it before making necessary recommendations to the president,” says Bheki Khumalo, representative for the president’s office.
“These lengthy sentences, as well as the comments made by the judicial officers, indicate the effect of the abuse upon the women was not understood or adequately taken into account,” says Lisa Vetten, gender unit head of the CSVR.
“As all legal remedies open to the five women have now been exhausted, we are asking the president to use his constitutional powers to grant each woman an early release.”
The campaign has been kick-started with an application for pardon for Maria Scholtz, who killed her husband in 1995. Applications for Elsie Morare, Harriet Chidi, Sharla Sebejan and Meisie Kgomo will soon follow.
Prior to killing her husband in 1995 Scholtz had endured years of tyranny, neglect, sexual abuse and cruelty to her three children from a previous marriage. When her husband, Frans, exposed himself to her teenage daughter, she interpreted this as a threat to rape the girl and in desperation she took a decision to kill him. She did, and she received a 20-year sentence.
The CSVR argues: “As the government is taking steps to address the racial imbalances of the past, so reducing the sentences of women who have killed their abusive partners would be one step towards addressing the gender imbalances of the past.”
There is international precedent for pardon. In the 1990s in Canada the establishment of the Self-Defence Review, an NGO devoted to re-examining the cases of women who had killed abusive partners, led to early releases for seven women.
The Justice for Women Campaign is supported by the Commission on Gender Equality and the National Network of Violence Against Women.
The argument for a presidential pardon is based on the fact that current law doesn’t consider the differences in strength between men and women; for a self-defence argument to succeed it must be shown that the attack occurred immediately after provocation, or threat to life, says Vetten.
Because women are less strong physically than men, the murder is often premeditated and often includes a third party. For this, women get steep sentences because the justice system views the act as premeditated, which allows little possibility to claim “the heat of the moment”.
The argument for harsh sentences, Vetten says, is that they deter would-be killers. But CSVR research, examining conviction and sentencing patterns for cases of spousal murders from 1994 to 1998 in three Gauteng courts, found that for every woman who killed her partner, four men killed their female partners.
About “two-thirds of these women killed in circumstances in which they were abused by their partners. Women’s killing of abusive partners is not widely prevalent and so does not need to be deterred by harsh sentences. These killings are the result of circumstances, and not bad character.”
The campaign aims to achieve a national review of the sentences of all women who have killed their abusive partners.
Vetten says: “If we want to prevent situations where women kill their abusive partners, then we need to make more domestic violence services available not put women in prison for long periods of time.”
Research by Kailash Bhana from the CSVR on children’s experience of paternal abuse and maternal imprisonment shows that most children are traumatised by the incarceration of their mothers. Some of their comments include: “My father was horrible to my mother. He didn’t treat her like a wife. That’s why I always ask: ‘Who killed who first?'”
“When my mom comes out everything will go back to the way it was before and we will be happy.”
“The thing I am most scared of is coming home from school because I know my uncle will beat me.”
“When we lived with my parents we had bicycles. Now we don’t even have food and clothes.”
Bhana says that the centre is not recommending that women should not be punished for the crimes they commit but that their actions should be seen within the context of abuse; and that “long-term incarceration, especially in the context of domestic violence, is patently not in the best interests of children”.
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