TRC Final Report

Volume 4

Chapter 7

Subsection 8

Capital punishment

The primary purpose of this submission is to ensure that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission places on record the fact that the use of the death penalty in South Africa constituted a gross human rights violation … It would be academic to ask whether or not the death penalty was associated with ‘conflicts of the past’. It was but one of the methods used by those with power to oppress those without. 1 154 people were executed in South Africa in the ten-year period 1976-1985. The state apparatus that arrested, interrogated, tried, imprisoned and executed 1 154 people for capital crimes in South Africa was the same apparatus that maintained, often by brutal force, the apartheid system.⁹

47 As the department that implemented the death penalty, the prisons department formed an integral part of the apartheid system. Testimony at the hearing emphasised that capital punishment was used as an important weapon against opponents of apartheid. More particularly, the audience at the second day of the hearing listened in horror as witnesses told of experiences on death row, providing what one commentator described as the “most damning indictment of capital punishment ever heard in this country”.

48 Paula McBride told of her perceptions as a daily visitor to death row between 1987 and 1990. She came to give evidence, she said, because, “In my mind, the death penalty is a gross human rights violation and should be recorded [as such] at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” Capital punishment, she said, “brutalises not only those who are sentenced, but those who sentence them – the judges – and it brutalises our whole country, because if we allow it to happen, we participate in it.”

49 She described in graphic detail what happened when someone was hanged, and the effect it had on families. She cited, for instance, the ‘Christmas rush’ of 1988, when twenty-eight people were hanged in one week. She pointed out that 95 per cent of the people who were hanged were black and that 100 per cent of these had been sentenced by white males. Over the period of the Commission’s mandate, over 2 500 people were hanged in South Africa. In South Africa, as in America, the death sentence was far more likely to be imposed if the victim of the crime was white.

50 Paula McBride describes conditions on Death Row at Pretoria Maximum Security Prison:

The Maximum Security Prison in Pretoria was a prison designed for death. Its sole purpose as an institution was to imprison persons condemned to death, clothe them, feed them and keep them whole until they were killed. However, from the first time a prisoner arrived at Death Row, elaborate mechanisms were put in place to ensure that he or she would not kill themselves. This was a job reserved for the state and no one would take it away.

The lights were on 24 hours a day; prisoners were watched from a grille above their heads, they wore no belts. After the suicide in 1987 of Frikkie Muller, who gouged his wrists with a shoe nail on the day before his execution, all the condemned wore soft shoes …

No studying was allowed – and prisoners were often taunted with the fact of their impending death. What do you want to study for? Why are you exercising? What is the point of improving your body or mind when you are going to die?.

The routine was ghastly but familiar. The Sheriff would arrive at Pretoria Maximum Security Prison with a batch of notices in his hand … The prison warders would walk down the silent corridors between the individual cells, and footsteps would stop outside.

Those that were, in [the opinion of the State President] no longer fit for this world were sent to the ‘Pot’ … It was here, in the waiting cells, that the hourly count down began. It was also here that the traditional silence of Death Row was broken – with singing day and night. Singing mostly of traditional and religious hymns but sometimes of freedom songs where those to be hanged were guerrillas.

During the week that they waited to die, they were measured for the hangman: the thickness of their necks, their height and their weight are all measured to ensure that the length of the drop is calculated correctly.

On the night before the execution was to take place … each of the condemned prisoners [would be given] a whole, deboned chicken to eat and R4 to buy something from the prison tuckshop …

The bodies would be taken in the coffins … to unmarked graves in one of the segregated graveyards around Pretoria … No family members were allowed to accompany the coffins or to pray while the bodies were interred. At a later date, families were handed a grave number.

51 Asked to comment on whether the death penalty was a deterrent, McBride said it had never been proved that capital punishment would stop crime, nor had any of the approximately 250 death row prisoners interviewed ever said they felt it had deterred them. Her verdict on those calling for the reintroduction of the death penalty was clear:

People who put out the call “Hang them … Bring back the death penalty” do not have any understanding of what it does, not just to the people who are hanged, but to our society. It is a brutal, barbarous, uncivilised, grotesque part of our society and South Africa should be the prouder that we have been one of the countries in the world to take it off our statute books.

52 Two witnesses gave harrowing testimony about the time they spent on death row. Mr Duma Khumalo and Ms Machabane Theresa Ramashamola were members of the ‘Sharpville Six’. They were sentenced to death for common purpose, but reprieved the day before they were to be executed. Both described in chilling detail how the experience affected them and their subsequent nightmares. Ramashamola’s final statement was received in awkward silence by the hearing:

At the present moment, I don’t want to live, as far as life is concerned, if they would have hanged me at that time, it would be much better. It would have been painful then, but that would be it.

53 The final witness in this section was Warrant Officer Steinberg, who served as a young warder on death row in Pretoria for more than two years prior to the imposition of the moratorium on hanging. One of the most telling aspects of his testimony was his evidence on the lack of special training given to warders on death row. He was never, he said, asked whether he had moral objections to hanging, nor was he given any advice on how to handle those about to be executed.

54 During the tea break after this testimony, a remarkable meeting took place at the entrance to the marquee. Two former death row prisoners shook hands and joked with the man who would, had they not been reprieved, have accompanied them to their execution. It was the kind of meeting that could only have happened at a hearing of the Commission.