How is it that the police in Namibia have so seamlessly moved into the terrifying space previously held by apartheid security forces, the police and the army?
Virtually every new set of judgments from the Namibian courts has one or more cases of police brutality and related unlawful behaviour, and the most recent is no exception.
This time the decision comes from the apex Supreme Court of Namibia, where the judges had to consider the sentence passed on three members of the Windhoek city police convicted of murdering Mandela Ramakutla.
On April 16 2013, the three arrested Ramakutla, a healthy 17-year-old boy, on suspicion that he had stolen a laptop from the headquarters of the city police. Just hours later, they handed him over to the Namibian police at the Windhoek police station to be locked up.
By that stage, Ramakutla was already comatose, unresponsive and unable to move. One of the three accused, however, told the police duty officer that the boy was “drunk and feigning injuries”.
Ramakutla’s father, alerted by relatives who had seen the boy in a vehicle with the police that there was something seriously wrong, set out to find his son. He arrived about an hour after the boy was booked in at the police station and insisted that his son be taken to hospital. He had some trouble achieving this, as the police claimed they had no transport.
Though ultimately admitted to the hospital’s intensive care unit, Ramakutla never recovered from his comatose state and died nine days later, still in hospital.
The postmortem evidence makes clear that he had sustained “massive and widespread injuries” resulting from “severe and sustained assaults”. Both sides of his head were damaged and there were injuries to his earlobe, shoulder, arms, buttocks, forehead, lips, chin and abdomen.
“There was blood in his urine and nose,” the supreme court noted. “Severe trauma was observed to his kidneys. His head injuries were described as severe.”
Clearly, these were not “self-inflicted injuries” as the police claimed. It was also clear that Ramakutla hadn’t been drunk.
Ramakutla sustained ‘massive and widespread injuries’ resulting from ‘severe and sustained assaults’
All three of the police officers charged in connection with his death denied assaulting him, though he’d been in their custody from his arrest until they dropped him off, unconscious, at the police station.
The high court convicted the three of murder “with constructive intent” (dolus eventualis) and of attempting to obstruct the course of justice. The judge then held that it was “common practice” in such cases for the court to impose a lesser sentence.
‘A plainly brutal and cruel attack’
But the supreme court found that the high court judge incorrectly formulated the requirement for constructive intent. The effective 10-year sentence imposed as a result of this incorrect formulation was so far from what the supreme court would have imposed that the apex court could substitute its view.
Given the cumulative impact of the aggravating features of the murder, said the judges, a long term of imprisonment, certainly of “considerably greater duration” than the effective 10 years imposed by the high court, was warranted. They therefore sentenced each of the accused to 18 years, with no part of it suspended, calling the action of the three “a plainly brutal and cruel attack over a sustained period”.
This won’t be the end of the matter, however, as the boy’s family is preparing a major damages claim against the police, a case that will surely, once again, result in the Namibian taxpayer having to fork out for unlawful actions by members of the police.
In an unrelated judgment also delivered last week, a judge of the Namibian high court spoke about how, in a number of cases, the judiciary had expressed its “displeasure” at continuing “despicable” police conduct.
“Individual perpetrators” within the police are allowed to “disappear into the undergrowth” rather than being held accountable, and government agencies have a duty to “weed out” police who act outside the law, the judge complained.
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