Durban - A group of “lifers” from Westville Prison who took their bid for parole to the Durban High Court, have moved one step closer to freedom.
Judge Nompumelelo Radebe on Saturday ordered the Minister of Correctional Services, Michael Masutha, to consider nine of the 11 inmates for parole and stop “postponing or delaying” the process.
The Correctional Supervision and Parole Board and the Case Management Committee at Westville Prison’s Medium B section, were ordered to forward the minister the inmates’ profile reports and within four months of receiving them, Masutha will have to inform them of whether or not they have been successful.
The judge reserved her reasons but during proceedings it emerged that some of the inmates were as much as five years overdue to be considered.
This was according to the representations of one among them, Erwin Christmas. In 2002, Christmas, a former accountant, was sentenced to life behind bars for murdering Pinetown magistrate Anthony Hofert. Hofert was presiding over Christmas’s trial for hijacking at the time.
Christmas represented himself and his peers in their case against the minister. He told Judge Radebe all of them were between two-and-a-half and five years overdue to be considered for parole.
The minister’s legal team conceded that nine of the 11 were eligible and said the process was under way. But advocate Kavitha Bheemchund said there was a backlog in the system and they could not be given preferential treatment.
Judge Radebe, however, seemed unimpressed by this explanation. “A backlog of five years?” she asked.
The minister’s team did argue that two of the inmates were not eligible and the judge ultimately dismissed their cases.
The inmates were contending they were eligible in terms of the old policy and guidelines used before the new Correctional Services Act came into effect on October 1, 2004, as they were sentenced before then. But Zamokuhle Shange was sentenced in November 2004 and Thamsanqa Shozi in 2006.
Christmas said last week that as per an internal memo, they understood these two could still be considered for parole because they had committed their crimes before October 1, 2004.
The minister’s team said this was not the case. Bheemchund had told the court that if it were, a convict who had evaded arrest for several years could benefit from this directive. Judge Radebe seemed to agree.