by Innocent Mvundula
A video clip of relatives of Mzomera Ngwira crying as he was driven away to start a 4 year jail term has reminded me of what I first observed when I started working as a criminal defence lawyer in 2009.
Crime impacts both the offender’s as well as the survivor’s family. Take the offence of murder for instance. One convicted of murder and sentenced to life or death is lost to his family as well. Just like the one he cruelly murdered.
There was this other time.
A drunk man got into a fight with his brother. The drunk overpowering the sober one, the sober one reached for a hoe handle and smashed his drunk brother’s skull.
The drunk died and the sober one was arrested and thrown into jail to await his trial. Am not sure whether he pleaded guilty or not when eventually he had the grace of his day in court. But he was convicted of manslaughter. An offence lesser in severity than murder but one that routinely attracts significant prison time.
On the day of sentence, as the Judge sat down to read to the condemned man his fate, he noticed that hunched somewhere in the near empty gallery of his courtroom was a sobbing old woman. Inquiring from the convict’s counsel who the woman was, he was politely told that she was the mother of 2 sons: the drunk and the sober one.
One then deceased and the other the convict then standing before him.
The judge invited the woman forward. ‘Why are you crying?’ He asked her. Her response was sad.
‘I am crying because I am about to lose my second and now only son to jail. With the other one gone, I will have no one to look after me….’
And on and on she went making an impassioned and heart rending plea for her only son. The one who had murdered her other one.
When she finished, there was a moment of uncertain silence in the courtroom.
‘Well then…’ The Judge began.
‘Go get your son and take him home.’
The steps of the disbelieving old woman were tentative. But she walked to the dock, grabbed her only son and walked with him home.
Loness Micongwe was the lawyer for the sober one.
Justice Mr. R Chinangwa (then a High Court Judge) was the one who sat to preside over the fate of the sober one.