The decision by the Supreme Court of Appeal to reduce a life sentence imposed on a woman who hired hitmen to kill her abusive partner has given new hope to the 169 women in jail for killing their partners.
The court on Thursday took a history of abuse into account when it reduced the life sentence imposed on Anita Ferreira in January 2001 to six years, and ruled that the portion of the term she has not yet served be suspended for three years. She will be freed next week. It is the first time a South African court has taken a history of abuse into account when handing down a sentence.
The hitmen’s appeal against their life sentences was dismissed.
Ferreira was convicted of murder after hiring two men to kill her partner, Cyril Parkman, in 1994. Although the Cape High Court accepted that Parkman had repeatedly and extensively abused Ferreira mentally and physically, the judge sentenced her to the mandatory life-term for contract killings.
Ferreira’s lawyers argued then and in the Appeal Court that the history of abuse ought to have been taken as ”substantial and compelling reason” for a deviation from the mandatory sentence.
The Appeal Court agreed. Writing for the majority, Judge CT Howie noted that ”if the witnesses in this case spoke with acceptable authority on the subject of abused women and the reason why they sometimes kill their abusers (and, as I have said, neither the facts nor their expertise were in dispute), they conveyed, at the same time, the explanation why the abused woman, subjectively, feels unable to escape by any other route than by homicide.
”A proper analysis and understanding of the evidence given in this case shows, in my view, that this is, indeed, what the first appellant [Ferreira], subjectively did feel, and that what she experienced and eventually did conformed (as regards a victim’s behaviour in response to grave abuse) to a pattern that has been documented and written about scientifically, legally and judicially in the major English-speaking jurisdictions around the world.”
Joyce Maluleke, director of gender issues in the Department of Justice, said the ruling would strengthen the department’s hand when it sought court records involving the 169 cases it was researching and when it requested the Department of Correctional Services to provide files of prisoners in the same category as Ferreira.
Maluleke welcomed the judgement, but noted: ”We do not want to bring the criminal justice system into disrepute by acquitting women simply because they are women. We want justice — there has to be fairness.”
She cautioned against expectations that all women incarcerated for the murder of their partners would be freed. ”In Canada, where there was a judicial review [of cases similar to Ferreira’s], six of the 97 applicants were released. It will depend on the circumstances of each case,” she said.
”While men have had the defence that they were so angry when, for example, they found their wife with another man and lost it, women have not had that defence.
”The legal system has not recognised accumulated anger or abuse as a defence. Instead, it has regarded that as premeditated and given the heaviest sentence possible.”
The judgement would also be used in the continued applications for parole for women who had served half (or, if sentenced to life, at least seven years) of their terms, and for an outright presidential pardon for those who had not yet served that period — provided they had exhausted all legal remedies available to them, Maluleke said.
Although the judges were unanimous that Ferreira deserved a lighter sentence, Judge RM Marais differed with his colleagues on the actual time she should serve.
”Making full allowance for the bestial treatment to which the appellant was subjected by the deceased, and her subjective belief that ending his life was the only way out, I cannot bring myself to concur in the notion that a wholly suspended sentence of six years is the sentence that the trial court should have imposed — or that it is the sentence that should now be imposed.
”It trivialises the crime of murder in general — and contract-killing in particular. In my view, nothing less than eight years’ imprisonment would be appropriate,” he wrote in a dissenting judgement.