No bail for Pinetown crash driver

Published Oct 22, 2013

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The driver accused of killing 24 people in last month's Pinetown horror crash has been denied bail in the Pinetown Magistrate's Court.

Sanele Goodness May's truck ploughed through an intersection in Pinetown on 5 September, taking out four taxis and two cars.

Magistrate Gwendolyn Robinson said that because May is an illegal immigrant, the court would be required to legalise his residency status while he was awaiting trial. It was also not possible to send him to his home country of Swaziland as the court would then have no authority to impose bail conditions from there.

WILL THE CHARGES STICK?

However, May's lawyer Louis Barnard believes that the murder charges against the driver would not stand.

Barnard used the case of Western Cape taxi driver Jacob Humphreys as an example.

Humphreys was charged with 10 counts of murder after jumping a queue of cars and trying to drive through a railway boom in August 2010. Ten children in his taxi died.

He was convicted of murder, but the Supreme Court of Appeal set aside the murder charges in March and replaced them with 10 counts of culpable homicide and cut his 20-year sentence to one of eight years.

Barnard said that, to find May guilty, the court would have to find he was suicidal on the night of the crash.

Arguing that May be granted bail, he told the court there was no evidence linking his client to murder. Sapa & IOL

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