Pretoria - Three years after being sentenced to 25 years' imprisonment, two Boeremag members – brothers Wilhelm and Johan Pretorius – made an unsuccessful bid for leave to appeal against their sentences and convictions on treason and related charges.
The bearded Wilhelm and his clean-shaven brother entered the Gauteng High Court, Pretoria, on Monday under the close watch of heavily armed Correctional Services guards. They were shackled and fitted with stun belts in case they made a dash for freedom. The alert guards stood around the pair, firearms at hand, until the judge eventually told them to sit down.
The guards were so bent on nothing going wrong that they even complained about the media having their cellphones with them.
The pair conducted their own case, saying they had an uphill battle with Legal Aid to obtain the advocate who promised to act for them. They were also not able to obtain all the documents for their application and were only recently allowed access to a computer.
The pair’s hopes were dashed when Judge Eben Jordaan refused them leave to appeal, but they vowed to petition the Supreme Court of Appeal in Bloemfontein directly.
Wilhelm asked the judge what the next step was. The ever patient Judge Jordaan explained the procedure and advised them to have all their documents in order before approaching the supreme court.
Aggrieved with their lengthy sentences, the pair argued lthey were shockingly harsh. But the judge said they were in proportion to their convictions.
The brothers had a list of reasons why the court should allow them permission to appeal against their convictions. These included that they had an unfairly long trial – more than 10 years – did not have legal representation at times, and that the court refused to regard them as prisoners of war.
Refusing leave to appeal, Judge Jordaan said he thought the Boeremag trial was the longest in the history of criminal trials, until a colleague told him there had been a longer trial in England. The length of the trial was not the court’s fault, as many of the 23 accused in the trail launched various applications, he said.
Every time they had grievances, such as a lack of a legal representative, he tried to come to their aid, the judge said. They did not qualify as prisoners of war, as they were not in a legitimate war against what they regarded as a racist government.