Pretoria - After 27 years in jail and several fruitless attempts to obtain parole, it was now time for the court to once and for all decide on finalising the issue, counsel for Janusz Walus argued yesterday.
Advocate Roelof du Plessis, acting for the Polish assassin, asked the Gauteng High Court, Pretoria, to release Walus on parole.
Justice and Correctional Services Minister Ronald Lamola earlier this year denied him parole.
Du Plessis argued that Walus had paid his dues for the 1993 assassination of SACP leader Chris Hani.
“In the words of Martin Luther King, we must forgive … Now is the time to show ubuntu … ”
Du Plessis said the court should grant Walus parole and not refer the matter back to the minister for reconsideration, as it would mean further delays.
“This matter cannot go back and forth all the time. It makes a mockery of the justice process,” Du Plessis said.
He told Judge Elizabeth Kubushi, Walus had done everything in his power over the years to prove that he had rehabilitated and was remorseful for the killing.
A Correctional Service official who worked closely with Walus in the Kgosi Mampuru II prison submitted a report in which he recommended that the Polish national be released on parole.
He said Walus was a model prisoner who had completed all the rehabilitation programmes and recommended that he be given a second chance at life outside the prison walls.
A social worker also submitted a report in which she said Walus truly had remorse and that he tried to contact the Hani family to apologise, Du Plessis said.
“It is now time to give the man a second chance … Somebody at a stage must make that decision.”
He argued that the minister could not each time find another reason not to grant parole to Walus.
“We all know it’s a difficult decision to make – for the minister and the court. But the court must just apply the law,” he said.
Advocate Marumo Moerane, acting on behalf of the minister, said it was ironic that the Walus camp was arguing the principles of ubuntu, while he exhibited the opposite when he executed Hani.
Moerane said Walus expressed his remorse only 20 years after the murder of Hani, when he for the first time applied for parole.
“The deceased in this matter is not only a historical figure, but someone I personally knew,” Moerane said.
He told the court that both of them arrived at what was now the University of Fort Hare in 1959 – Hani at the age of 16 and he (Moerane) aged 17. They left together in 1961.
“We are dealing with a flesh and blood human. Not a historical figure.”
He argued that parole was no right, as Walus was sentenced to life imprisonment for the crime and there was no set time frame when he should be released.
The widow of Hani, Limpho Hani, who was in court yesterday, is also opposing the new bid for his release.
Her lawyers argued that this was a crime unlike many others in the country.
The court was told that she did not accept Walus’s apology, neither did she or the SACP accept that he had any remorse.
The widow voiced her disapproval to a friend in the public gallery while Walus’s counsel asked that the principles of ubuntu should apply.
She also denied the Pretoria News an opportunity to take pictures and complained that she was being “harassed”.
A group of SACP members who were inside court, asked that she be left in peace.
They displayed placards outside court, in which they called on Walus to “rot in jail”.
Judgment was, meanwhile, reserved.
Pretoria News