In S. Africa, Hangings Are Routine Justice

They wrote letters on the last day and, as is the custom, sang all night long, the hymns and political anthems echoing through Death Row’s bleak and spotless passageway.

Then, as dawn broke over the hills around the prison’s yellow stone walls, five of the condemned men were escorted to a small room, lined up beneath lengths of rope and hanged together.

“This is farewell, and it troubles my heart,” prisoner Dan Fortune had written a friend before being put to death for killing a fellow inmate.

The execution of Fortune and the other criminals at Pretoria Central Prison a few months ago did not even merit mention in the newspapers: Hangings--as many as seven at a time--have become routine.

South African authorities condemn and execute more people than any other Western legal system, putting three inmates to death each week, on average.

Last year, 164 people were executed here, compared to 25 in the United States. So far this year, 44 have been put to death in South Africa and five in America.

Legal scholars believe the large number of executions in South Africa is a natural result of an exceptionally high crime rate, a law that requires the death penalty in capital cases where there are no “extenuating circumstances” and a one-stop appeals process that is quickly exhausted.

A small but growing number of executions, though, also stem from the political unrest of 1984-86, and the recent case of the Sharpeville Six has reopened debate in South Africa over the death penalty in cases of politically motivated capital crimes.

The Sharpeville Six--five men and one woman, convicted in the 1984 mob murder of a local black official--received a stay of execution only 15 hours before they were to hang last month. A judge based the stay on new evidence, which will be presented at a later hearing.

Of the 260 people awaiting execution in South Africa today, 45 were convicted on offenses relating to the political unrest here. In the last two years, six blacks have gone to the gallows for murders that some South Africans consider to have been, ultimately, the result of anti-apartheid causes.

All the country’s executions are carried out at Pretoria Central, on the edge of the capital’s modern downtown district. Death Row is one of South Africa’s hidden places. No visitors, other than prison officials and judges, are allowed.

Waiting in ‘The Pot’

Families are notified about a week before an execution, when the doomed men are put in a communal holding cell they call “the pot” to await the hangman together. A day or two before the chosen date, families are allowed a final visit. On the day of the hanging, always at dawn, families and friends get no closer than the prison chapel, where the coffins are brought after being nailed shut.

The 164 executed last year in South Africa, with a population of 26 million (a figure that excludes the “independent homelands,” which have their own court systems), was the highest number here in at least 75 years. That was four more than Iran, population 47 million, and 32 more than China, population 1 billion, the countries with the next-highest number of executions, according to Amnesty International, the London-based human rights group. The group notes, however, that the figures for many countries, including China and Iran, are unconfirmed and probably higher.

South African jurists and lawyers say the statistics for this country should be interpreted in the context of the high South African crime rate and a tough law-and-order tradition, and not seen solely against the political backdrop of apartheid.

Death Row here is a 10th the size of the one in the United States, where there are 2,021 inmates awaiting execution in 37 states and where death penalty appeals often drag on for a decade or more.

1 in 10 Overturned

In South Africa, about one death sentence in 10 is overturned on appeal or commuted by the president. Most sentences are carried out within two years of conviction.

While the number of executions has increased in the United States, to 25 last year from 18 in 1986, Western Europe has had no executions since 1985. Worldwide, four countries abolished the death penalty last year.

“If we want to know what the death penalty looks like when operating at full throttle within a Western legal system, South Africa is . . . the only country we can look to,” David Bruck, a South Carolina lawyer who has studied the legal system here, wrote in New Republic magazine last July.

According to John Dugard, a law professor with the Center for Applied Legal Studies in Johannesburg, the number of South Africa executions “is indicative of the general attitude towards human life here.”

Most Black or Colored

The overwhelming majority of South Africans executed are black or mixed-race Colored. In most years, only one or two whites have gone to the gallows, and until 1984 no white had been hanged for murdering a black.

Last November, though, two white men were executed for raping and murdering white women. And a few weeks ago, two white policemen were sentenced to death for killing two nonwhites they suspected of being drug dealers.

Judges note that most people who live in South Africa are black (about 85%) and most violent crimes are committed by blacks, often against other blacks. Those jurists also note that black and other minority groups are disproportionately represented in American prisons as well.

All except one of the judges empowered to pronounce the death sentence in South Africa are white. Jules Browde, national chairman of Lawyers for Human Rights, thinks that this frequently causes a racial disparity in sentencing.

“A judge can often imagine a defendant being his child or even being in the same situation himself,” Browde said. “But if the defendant is black, especially in South Africa, it’s not as easy as that. A white judge cannot put himself in the shoes of a black youngster as easily as he could a white youngster.”

Backed as Crime Deterrent

Many South Africans, black as well as white, strongly support the death penalty as a deterrent to violent crime. And American lawyers who have studied South African trials characterize them as deliberate, fair proceedings.

Although South Africa’s population is less than one-eighth that of the United States, its murder rate is three times higher. Some black townships record a dozen or more murders on an average weekend.

Although the death penalty can be imposed in cases of rape, kidnaping, aggravated robbery, treason and terrorism, all but a handful of the executions here come in murder cases. No one in recent times has been hanged for treason or terrorism unless the act resulted in a death.

Of 1,335 people put to death here in the last decade, only about 30 were people who had committed murders while acting in political causes, including the African National Congress’ 25-year guerrilla war against the white-minority led government in Pretoria.

Some human rights advocates argue that such cases should be considered acts of war and punished by imprisonment rather than death. But other legal experts, echoing the government’s own position, say they believe that “murder is murder.”

Although the Sharpeville Six case has political overtones, it has drawn international pleas for clemency primarily for another reason: None of the six was found to have contributed directly to the death of the town official. But the courts ruled that the six, as members of the mob, were guilty of murder because they had a “common purpose” with the murderers.

New Evidence Brought Stay

The stay of execution, though, was granted only on the grounds of some new evidence--that a prosecution witness may have given perjured testimony.

International pressure seems unlikely to lift any South African death sentences, including those stemming from so-called “politically motivated” crimes. Many of those cases are expected to reach the execution stage this year.

Last year, South Africa’s Supreme Courts imposed 248 death sentences, the appeals courts overturned 19 and President Pieter W. Botha commuted 20. Beyond providing those figures, the South African Justice Department declined to discuss capital punishment.

South Africa has no jury trials. All criminal cases are decided by judges, sometimes assisted by court assessors. Judges are required to impose the death sentence in capital cases, from murder to treason, unless extenuating circumstances “surrounding the deed” can be found. It is a requirement that some judges find too restrictive, and respected figures in the legal community here recently have argued that imposition of death sentences should be left to the judge’s discretion.

“I had cases where the circumstances surrounding the deed were not legally extenuating, but I knew the guy was basically not a murderer and that it would probably never happen again,” retired provincial Supreme Court Justice Gerrit Coetzee said in an interview. “Nevertheless, my hands were tied.

“I imposed many death sentences, and I hated every one of them.”