Death Penalty Abolished in S. Africa : Justice: Court says taking anyone’s life would be unconstitutional. Ruling ends grim wait for more than 450 prisoners.

The new Constitutional Court abolished the death penalty Tuesday, ending five years of ambiguity and fear for more than 450 prisoners convicted of capital crimes.

Arthur Chaskalson, the court president, said the 11 judges had ruled unanimously in their first major decision since the court was officially convened in February to adjudicate constitutional issues.

“Everyone, including the most abominable of human beings, has the right to life, and capital punishment is, therefore, unconstitutional,” Chaskalson said in a written judgment.

The ruling is to take effect immediately.

Although South Africa’s apartheid regime once executed dozens of criminals and political foes each year, no one has been put to death since 1989. Then-President Frederik W. de Klerk declared a moratorium on executions in February, 1990, when he released Nelson Mandela, now the nation’s president, from prison and legalized banned political groups.

But the law remained on the books, and 453 prisoners were sentenced to hang, prompting an emotional national debate.

The condemned are now expected to have their sentences commuted to life in prison.

The court ruling had been expected, although death penalty advocates and opposition politicians argued that abolition of capital punishment would encourage violent crime in a society already battered by sky-high rates of murder, burglary and carjacking.

“We feel it gives out the wrong signal in a country where the [murder] rate is the highest in the world for a country not at war,” said Danie Schutte, spokesman for the former ruling National Party.

But the court considered the constitutional right to life paramount.

“Retribution cannot be accorded the same weight under our constitution as the right to life and dignity,” Chaskalson wrote. “It has not been shown that the death sentence would be materially more effective to deter or prevent murder than the alternative sentence of life imprisonment would be.”

He concluded that a “clear and convincing case that is required to justify the death sentence as a penalty for murder has not been made.”

The case under consideration involved two men, Themba Makwayane, 36, and Movusu Mchunu, 24, who were sentenced to hang for the murder of two bank employees and two police officers during an armed robbery Aug. 31, 1990.

Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace laureate and an ardent opponent of capital punishment, said he was “thrilled” with the court’s ruling.

“It is in fact an obscenity to say to somebody who has killed . . . ‘We want to show you that we care about life so we kill you too,’ ” he told Reuters news agency.

The decision was handed down the day before Mandela is to defend himself in a snap debate in Parliament on opposition party demands that he be charged as an accomplice to murder.

The furor arose Thursday when Mandela told Parliament that he had authorized guards at the headquarters of the African National Congress to “kill people,” if necessary, to defend the building and its occupants against armed Zulu protesters rampaging through Johannesburg on March 28 last year.

Mandela said he grew desperate after discovering that police had ignored his pleas to set up roadblocks to stop supporters of Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party from converging on the ANC headquarters.

The Zulus were marching to protest the country’s first democratic elections to be held the following month.

“I gave the instructions to our security that if they attack the house, please, you must protect that house even if you have to kill people. . . . It was absolutely necessary for me to give that instruction,” he said.

Up to 60 people were killed in and around the terrified city, including eight protesters shot outside ANC’s Shell House offices. Unidentified ANC guards fired down on the group from a concrete balcony.

Critics have long complained that the ANC has given little cooperation to police since the “Shell House massacre” and that Mandela has condoned a cover-up by his aides.

After Mandela spoke of his role, Inkatha demanded that he be questioned by police and be charged as an “accessory to murder.”