V3564 Willy Jacob Mpipi |
21 |
Five men were charged with the murder of their cell mate in Leeuwkop Prison, situated between Johannesburg and Pretoria. They were Willy Mpipi, Johannes Mohapi, Ben Wesie, Jabulani Dube and Daniel Koopa. Mpipi and Mohapi were in their mid-forties, the others in their early thirties. They had killed Johannes Modise during the night of 18 December 1984.
This had happened in Cell 4 of C Section in Leeuwkop Prison. C Section is the maximum-security section of Leeuwkop. At six o’clock in the evening of 18 December 1984 eighteen long-term prisoners were locked in Cell 4 for the night. These men had been in prison so long that it had become their natural habitat. Almost all of them were members of prison gangs. Within the militaristic subculture of a gang there were ordinary members and officers of different ranks. Mohapi was a senior officer in the Big Fives gang, the Big Boss, or President, of the gang. His co-accused were all members of the Air Force 3 gang. Mpipi was a colonel, Dube was a chief inspector and the other two were ordinary airmen. There were also members of the 26s, the 28s and the Air Force 4 gang in the cell. Prisoners belonged to gangs for protection and survival. The price they paid for this protection was unquestioning loyalty to the gang and absolute obedience to the gang leaders.
The deceased, Johannes Modise, was placed in Cell 4 for the first time that afternoon. He was only twenty-two years old and had become Mohapi’s personal sex slave. Modise had tried to leave the 28s. The punishment for leaving or attempting to leave is often death, slowly and brutally meted out in front of as many other inmates as possible, for maximum deterrent effect. When Mohapi learned of Modise’s defection, he arranged for Modise to be transferred to Cell 4. It is not clear why he plotted to kill Modise for defecting from the 28s.
Shortly after six o’clock, after the cell had been locked for the night a gang meeting, or a skumba, was called for the members of the Air Force 3 gang and Mohapi of the Big Fives. The meeting was attended by Mpipi, Wesie, Dube, Koopa and Mohapi. At the time of the meeting Wesie, a common soldier in the Air Force 3 gang, was in trouble of his own. He had warned another prisoner, Thomas Mathebula, that he was about to be killed by the Air Force 3 gang and Mathebula, thus forewarned, had made arrangements to be transferred to another cell. Mathebula’s crime had been to obliterate his Air Force 3 gang tattoo on the inside of his arm and replace it with that of another gang. Because of his betrayal, Wesie was given a choice: he would be killed unless he played his part in killing Modise.
The plan was simple. Modise was to be called over and would then be killed. Mpipi would grab him by the neck and Wesie was to hold his legs. Mpipi called Modise over. He had chosen the spot very carefully: that small area against the door where they would be out of the sight of the warders on the catwalk. He asked Modise to sit down and as he did so Mpipi and Wesie grabbed him as planned. Mohapi, Dube and Koopa then trampled Modise until he no longer moved. Then Mpipi and Wesie also trampled him. Mpipi then called another inmate to come over and told him to make a bed for Modise. Mpipi and Mohapi laid Modise’s lifeless body on it.
When the bell rang at seven o’clock, signalling bedtime, Mpipi heard some noises from the deceased’s bed and went over and lifted the blanket, exposing Modise’s upper body. Mpipi called Wesie over and said, ‘The dog is still alive.’ A death rattle escaped Modise’s throat. Mpipi ordered Wesie to stomp on Modise’s neck, which he did. Mpipi then ordered Wesie back to his bed and Wesie complied.
A while later Modise’s death rattle started again. This time Mohapi came over to Mpipi, who took a belt from another inmate and said to Dube that they were going to strangle Modise with it. Dube said, ‘No, don’t do it,’ but Mpipi paid him no heed and Mohapi and he went on to strangle Modise with the belt. Mohapi then lay down next to the body and slept.
The killing had taken almost an hour. The next morning Mohapi took the bloodstained belt from Modise’s neck and handed it to Koopa. They flushed it down the toilet after Koopa had cut it up with a razor blade. When the cell was unlocked for breakfast, Warrant Officer Mkatshwa immediately asked why the deceased was not up. Mpipi said that Modise had sworn at him. Mkatshwa asked if that was reason enough to kill a man. There was no reply. He then asked the prisoners in the cell who had taken part in the killing to step aside and to hand over their prison tickets. Each prisoner had a ticket with his name, prison number and date of release. In prison this served as an identity document. The five accused stepped aside and handed over their tickets. In the culture of the prison, this was as unequivocal an admission of guilt as the circumstances allowed.
They were later formally arrested and taken to court for a first appearance.
The post-mortem examination on Modise’s body revealed an inordinately large number of injuries. He had not died easily or quickly. He had suffered multiple injuries, spread across the face and head, his neck and his upper torso. Internal injuries corresponded with the external signs of trauma. There were eleven separate injuries to the face and head alone, to the left and right cheekbones, above the left eye, both eye sockets and both sides of the face, to the left ear, lower jaw, both sides of the neck, and to the throat extending into the chest area below the neck. Internally there were large amounts of blood in the muscles of the chest and all the strap muscles on the right side. There was severe internal bruising of the muscles of the neck and of the back. There was a swelling of the brain. The lungs were filled with blood and the muscles of the heart were bruised. The liver was congested with blood and the left kidney showed some bruising.
The trial was a farce, a condition into which many trials involving prison gangs and cell murders degenerate. Wesie raised the defence of coercion. He pleaded that he had been forced to participate in the attack on the deceased. The test for this defence to succeed was whether the evil threatened to the person who claimed coercion as an excuse for killing weighed up equally to the evil done. There was good legal precedent for this principle.
The Court found Wesie’s evidence to be true in substance and found him not guilty on the basis that he had acted under coercion. The other four accused were convicted, Mpipi and Mohapi of murder and Dube and Koopa of assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm.
Each of the men had a long list of prior convictions. Each of them had previously been convicted of offences involving serious violence. Mpipi, Mohapi and Dube had killed before. Mohapi had been previously sentenced for trampling a fellow prisoner to death, and was serving that very sentence when he participated in Modise’s murder. Mpipi had previously kicked a man to death in the cells. Dube had twice been convicted of murder; the second had been a cell murder.
The Judge sentenced Mpipi and Mohapi to death as there were no extenuating circumstances. Dube and Koopa received two years imprisonment each for assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm.
On 27 November 1987 Mpipi and Mohapi were informed by the Sheriff that they were to be hanged on 3 December 1987.
They had been in the death cells for a year and four months. Mpipi was forty-eight years old and Mohapi forty-nine.
There was still some time left before we had to be back in court. I asked Wierda, ‘Do the judges in this division regard being sworn at as sufficient provocation to constitute an extenuating circumstance?’ I was grasping at straws. In my division it would count for nothing.
‘Why are you so concerned about these people?’ he asked with a sweep of his arm. ‘There is nothing you can do except getting rid of them for good.’
I was staring in the distance and did not concentrate on Wierda’s words.
‘They kill even in prison,’ Wierda continued, speaking more to Roshnee than to me, as we were making our way back to court. ‘You can see that prison is no deterrent to them and no safeguard for us.’
I did not know what to say and Roshnee had given up arguing with Wierda. We crossed the street in silence, but the case had planted a seed of hope in my mind. The decision on the absence of extenuating circumstances in the prison murder case had been a majority decision, which meant that either the Judge or one of the Assessors had felt that the conditions in the prison were so degrading and inhuman that the actions of the killers were, from a moral point of view, less blameworthy. I immediately decided to concentrate our efforts even more on the special circumstances prevailing in Maximum, but I was not sure how Judge J P van Zyl would react to that.
According to his record of previous convictions Koopa had stood trial in C Court at the Palace of Justice in 1981. I remembered graffiti with his name on the wall in Cell 6 but I would have had to revisit the cell to recall its detail:
DANIEL KOOPA WAS HERE
DANIEL KOOPA
3/9/81 = 19 YEARS
6-10-81 = 29 YEARS
TOTAL = 48 YEARS
When we were seated at the defence table waiting for the Judge and his Assessors to make their entrance I asked Wierda to remind me to concentrate more on the Assessors. Anonymous though they were – I had forgotten their names as soon as we had left the Judge’s chambers after the introductions of the first day – they could swing a decision in our favour, or against us should we have persuaded the Judge but not them. Their votes carried exactly the same weight as that of the Judge on questions of fact. Winning 2–1 would be good enough for us, and it did not matter how the majority was made up.