Mood Grim at ’64 Trial of Mandela : South Africa: The judge pondered not guilt or innocence but life or death.

When red-robed Judge Quartus de Wet, sitting in Courtroom C of the Palace of Justice here, considered the case against Nelson R. Mandela in 1964, it was not a question of guilt or innocence that he pondered.

It was whether to send Mandela and seven co-defendants to Death Row or give them life sentences. A ninth man, Lionel Bernstein, was acquitted but arrested after the trial and banned.

“The atmosphere was very grim,” remembers George Bizos, a Johannesburg lawyer who was on the defense team. “There was a great hue and cry in the country, and a great fear among us all, that they would be sentenced to death.”

In his statement to the judge, introduced without cross-examination, Mandela had admitted his role in launching Umkhonto we Sizwe, or Spear of the Nation, the military wing of the then-banned African National Congress, and he said he was prepared to die for what he believed.

“It wasn’t just rhetoric,” said Bizos, who is still one of Mandela’s lawyers and a longtime friend. “Nelson has a sense of history, and he considered himself as one of a line of people who had been dealt with harshly by the law.”

The defendants were charged with sabotage, a capital crime equal to treason under South African law. The state accused them of recruiting people to make explosives and training them to plant them. In all, the charge sheet listed nearly 200 attacks of sabotage and damage to property aimed at symbols of apartheid, such as rail lines and pass offices, during 1961-63.

The defendants and their four attorneys discussed whether they should even testify in their own defense, with some arguing that doing so would be tantamount to accepting the legality of the proceedings.

But, because the government planned to cross swords with the defendants on political issues, it was decided that the defendants would place their positions on record. The resulting speech from the prisoner’s dock by Mandela, delivered to a packed courtroom in 1964, came to be the guiding document for the armed struggle against Pretoria.

Their defense was that they had no option, given the violence launched by the state against peaceful protest, and they argued that it was nothing more than what the white Afrikaner people had done years earlier to win self-determination under British colonial rule. As Umkhonto we Sizwe’s manifesto, seized by police, had said: “There comes a time in the life of a nation when they can no longer turn the other cheek.”

“As a legal defense, it wasn’t one,” Bizos says. “There was no legal defense. They said, ‘Yes, we formed this organization.’ There was no attempt to avoid responsibility.”

In his closing arguments, Percy Yutar, the deputy attorney general, said he was amazed by the “conceit and deceit” of the defendants, who he contended represented less than 1% of the black population.

Yutar described the crime as “a classic case of the intended overthrow of the government by force and violence. It is tragic to think that the accused, who between them did not have the courage to commit a single act of sabotage themselves, should have incited their followers to acts of guerrilla warfare, open rebellion and ultimately civil war.”

Judge De Wet, who had heard the lawyer Mandela defend clients in his courtroom many times, sentenced the eight convicted men to life in prison, saying “that is the only leniency I can show.”

“The primary concern was to save their lives,” Bizos said. “And the verdict was a tremendous relief.

“The feeling at the time, both of the prisoners and ourselves, was that the life sentence would not be served,” he added. “Certainly we didn’t think in terms of 26 or 27 years. Somehow it always seemed that apartheid would come to an end within the near future.”

Mandela, released Sunday, was the last to regain his freedom.

Dennis Goldberg was released in 1985 after accepting President Pieter W. Botha’s offer of an amnesty if he renounced violence. As a white, he had not been sent with the others to Robben Island prison, northwest of Cape Town, but was jailed on the mainland.

Govan Mbeki, born in 1910 and the oldest defendant, was freed in November, 1987, but was subjected to a banning order and restricted to Port Elizabeth until last fall.

Five were released last October under President Frederik W. De Klerk’s pledge to start negotiations with black leaders. The most prominent is Walter Sisulu, former secretary general of the ANC, and regarded as Mandela’s closest associate. He was placed under restrictions until Feb. 2 when De Klerk announced sweeping reforms.

The others freed last fall were Raymond Mhlaba, a trade union activist and anti-apartheid worker; Andrew Mlangeni, a former newspaper writer and one of the founding members of Umkhonto we Sizwe; Ahmed Kathrada, head of a left-wing Indian organization and member of Umkhonto we Sizwe’s high command; and Elias Matsoaledi, a union activist and leading member of Umkhonto we Sizwe.