The State had taken a vindictive position in seeking to punish Prince Sifiso Zulu and to portray him as a “drunken driving thug who should be harshly dealt with”.
This was among the submissions made in heads of argument filed in the Pietermaritzburg High Court on Friday by Zulu’s legal representatives, before Zulu’s appeal set down for March.
He was convicted of culpable homicide for the deaths of two people in an accident in March 2008. It was found his BMW X5 had gone through a red traffic light and crashed into a bakkie. The two dead and another 12 who were injured were passengers in the bakkie. Although Zulu denied being at the wheel of the BMW and said the driver had fled, he was sentenced to three years in jail.
He was also found to have failed to perform the duties of a driver after an accident and of having a blood alcohol concentration of more than 0.05g/100ml. His appeal was to have been heard last year, but Zulu failed to turn up as he was in Dubai. His bail was cancelled as a result. His attorney immediately brought an urgent application for an extension of his bail and for the appeal to be reinstated.
The application was granted on strict condition that if he had not filed his heads of argument for the appeal by February 11, his bail would be revoked and he would be sent to jail.
The thrust of Zulu’s argument, as contained in the appeal papers, was that the State had failed to prove a man called Bongumusa Gumede was not the driver of Zulu’s car.
The State set out to prove Zulu was the driver through circumstantial evidence joined together “so tight that if one piece of evidence were to fall off, then the whole case would collapse”, said the papers.
The State had relied on witnesses’ accounts and cellphone evidence.
They said the court should have found the witnesses’ accounts inconclusive and unreliable, and that they did not place Zulu at the scene of the accident but tended to exclude him. Also, the court had found that cellphone records merely placed Zulu in the vicinity of the accident scene at the approximate time of the accident, but did not identify him as the driver.
Of the sentence, it was submitted:
“The sentence is so harsh that it is unlikely to reform or rebuild Zulu. It is more likely to break him, in that he will never be able to pursue a business or political career.
“Given that business and politics are his passion, the effect of this particular sentence will be to permanently destroy a young man’s interest in life… this sentence lacks a rehabilitating component,” said the papers.
Instead, it suggested that the court consider a fine, non-custodial sentence or even an additional suspended term of imprisonment which would “hang like a sword over his head and serve as a deterrent to him from committing further similar crimes”. - The Mercury