In one way, this is a strangely abstract hearing. Themba Makwanyane and Mvuso Mchunu — these are the names of the murderers — are not present. They are in the death cells. The application has been made jointly by lawyers representing them, and associations called Lawyers For Human Rights, the Society For The Abolition Of The Death Penalty, and even the Government itself; a government challenging the laws of the country — a paradox arising out of the hangover of statutes from the old regime.
Themba Makwanyane, Mvuso Mchunu — who are they? It doesn’t matter to this tribunal, who they are, what they did, killers of four human beings; they are a test case for the most important moral tenet in human, existence.
That ancient edict. Thou shalt not kill.
There is only one individual present in the concentration under the low ceiling for whom the proceedings are not on this higher plane of abstract justice. Yet the eloquence of the arguments sometimes draws Harald onto the higher plane, the atmosphere is that of a lively debate, with the abolitionists’ lawyers basing their contention on sections of the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, which they quote (in the aura of lilies the young woman at his right scribbles down what he side-glances to read: Section 9 guarantees the right to life Section 10 protection of human dignity Section 11 outlaws cruel inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment). The abolitionist Counsel’s back, which is all that can be seen of him from the fifth row as he addresses the judges, sways with conviction as he gives his interpretation of Section 9: the first principle is the right not to be killed by the State. The retentionists’ Counsel interprets the same section as the State’s obligation to protect life by retaining the Death Penalty as the measure effective against violent crime that takes life. A letter from a member of the public is emotionally quoted: ‘the only way to cleanse our land is capital punishment’. The judges interrupt, cross question wittily, and expound their own views; the case for retention of the Death Penalty seems to come up against the unanswerable when the judge who has lost an arm and an eye by an agent of the previous regime’s attempt to murder him does not support an arm for an arm, an eye for an eye; does not express any wish to see the man hanged. Only the Judge President contains himself, reflectively, with perfect attention to all that is said, and sums up argument when this becomes too discursive. There is some clause in Section 33 which does allow for the limitation of constitutional rights — a questioning of the Last Judgment (she is scribbling again: only to the extent that it is reasonable and justifiable in an open and democratic society based on freedom and equality). The abolitionists’ Counsel cuts through the discretionary clauses discourse and argues that even if there is a ‘majoritarian’ position in favour of retaining the Death Penalty this does not mean it necessarily is the right position: the Court is sharply reminded that the question faced by the Court is whether the Death Penalty is constitutional, not whether it is justified by popular demand.
The Court has risen for the lunch recess. Once the Judge President has slipped through the curtains an informality breaks out. Groups gather and block the way between the rows of public seats. One of the judges comes from wherever it is they are in retreat to take some document from a messenger, he smiles and lifts a hand to friends but when they make for him shakes his head and disappears: it is not proper for the judges to discuss the case with anyone. The scent of lilies sidles past along the row with a hasty apology, already mouthing across Harald to someone waiting for her, What a blood-thirsty bunch … People are asking whether there’s anywhere in the building where one could get a cup of coffee, a handsome woman with an imperious head of white-streaked hair opens her picnic bag of mineral water and fruit for her companions and is amusedly rude to the official who tells her it is forbidden to eat or drink in court.
All this forms around Harald and eddies away.
They’ve gone in search of satisfying needs — toilets, food, drink — as at any intermission. Sitting on alone among emptied rows he is no longer disregarded; he is the focus of the shining arena, the vacated half-circle of official chairs up there identified now with the characteristics of the men and women to whom they were allotted. He gets up, walks down the stairs instead of taking the lift, goes out into the unreality of sunlight and the contrapuntal voices of black men working on a hole where some installation, water or electricity, is exposed for repair. Sun and main d’oeuvre — that is, has been the climate of the city, the human temporal taken along as eternal with the eternal. They will be here forever digging and singing. For a few moments dazzled by the sun, easy to have the illusion, nothing has changed. Those names, Themba Makwanyane, Mvuso Mchunu, two black criminals, are in the cells; the young architect is in his firm’s offices somewhere down there in the living city, drawing plans.
The Death Penalty is a subject for dinner table discussion for those, the others, who will drift back into the Court as Harald will. Their concern, whether they want the State to murder or want to outlaw the State as a murderer, is objective, assumed by either side as a responsibility and a duty owed to society. Nothing personal. The Death Penalty is an issue; it will be decided in this Court, reversed under another constitution in some future time, under some other government, God knows, God only knows how man has twisted and interpreted, reinterpreted, his Word, thou shalt not kill. For these men and women strolling back to the building from the coffee bars they have found down in the streets, their concern is the issue, a dispassionate value above his; he knows, and the God he has been responsible to all his life knows this. Like him, like Claudia and him, it is unthinkable that the issue would ever enter the lives of these men and women — who is there among them or theirs who would be so uncivilized as to kill as a solution to anger, pain, jealousy, despair? The retentionists fear death at the hands of others; the abolitionists abhor the right to repeat the crime by killing the killer; neither conceive they themselves could commit murder.
The only people with whom he would have common cause would be the parents of whoever Themba Makwanyane and Mvuso Mchunu might be, those to whom what is the subject of leamed argument is not an issue but at home with them, forced entry there by sons who murdered four people, and by the son who put a bullet into the head of the man on the sofa. It was unlikely these parents would be among the crowd in court, almost certainly they are poor and illiterate, afraid to think of exposing themselves to authority in a process incomprehensible any other way than as whether or not a son was going to be hanged one daybreak in Pretoria.
He stood a while after everyone else had re-entered the building. The flash of sunlight on the metal of cars signalled activity unceasing in the city, its chorus was muted into murmurs of what was always left half-unsaid down there; it was reaching him in waves of impulse.