Durban - Rape is a “despicable deed, particularly horrendous” when the victim is a child.
This was the opinion of two KwaZulu-Natal high court judges, dealing with an appeal involving sentencing in a rape case, who chose to disagree with a senior judge’s view on sentencing.
The appeal court judges, Gregory Kruger, Rashid Vahed and Mahendra Chetty, sitting in the Pietermaritzburg High Court, were dealing with the case of rape convict Celimphilo Zondo.
Zondo was convicted of rape in November 2003 and 10 months later, he was sentenced to life in prison.
In September 2013, Zondo was granted leave to appeal against the sentence imposed, with no reason given for the lengthy delay.
In his judgment handed down recently, Judge Gregory Kruger set aside Zondo’s sentence and ordered that he spend only 15 years in jail.
Judge Kruger said the court that sentenced Zondo had failed to take into account that he was only 27 when the incident took place, was a first offender and had spent two years in prison waiting for the matter to be finalised.
He agreed with the argument from Zondo’s lawyer that the act had been a result of a “brief lapse of judgment”.
He also found that the girl had not been threatened with violence and had suffered no other physical injuries.
But Judge Vahed, with Judge Chetty concurring, took a different view and their majority judgment set aside Zondo’s sentence of life imprisonment, but imposed a sentence of 20 years in jail.
According to the judgment, Zondo and the 10-year-old child were neighbours, and on the day of the incident, he asked her mother and grandmother to send her to a shop to buy him a cigarette. The girl bought the cigarette and took it to Zondo’s home and after she entered his home, he raped her.
The girl reported the incident to her grandmother and a case was opened with the police. While Judge Vahed agreed that life imprisonment was an inappropriate sentence, he said the court had to hand down a “stern and decisive” sentence.
“Rape is something that no one ought to endure,” said Vahed. “The complainant in this case must have been traumatised. One cannot even begin to imagine what impact these events must have had on her. It is not to the appellant’s (Zondo’s) benefit that there was no extraneous violence or physical injury other than the rape itself.”
He said to impose a sentence of 15 years would be an injustice. “The starting point is life imprisonment and against that, 15 years is too much of a deviation.”
The Mercury