Another day at the office ...

Yesterday morning, in my capacity as director of Wits Journalism's Justice Project (WJP), which investigates miscarriages of justice, I visited some awaiting trial prisoners - known in the incarceration business as ATDs (awaiting trial detainees) - at Johannesburg Prison ( Sun City). I was accompanied by a colleague, Nantie Steyn.

We were lucky enough to run bump into some representatives of the Judicial Inspectorate of Prisons - a watchdog organisation rendered largely toothless these days, but that is another story.

They knew of me in connection with a another matter and introduced me to a boy - well, he's nearly 21, but he's so frail and thin that he has the torso of a 15-year-old - no name for the moment - who's awaiting trial for murder.

Besides being thin and slight, the lad also moved with apparent difficulty and held his hands close to his chest and his fingers in a gnarled sort of way, as though suffering from massive arthritis of the hands.

This is the story, abbreviated, of the young man, whom I will call Lawrence. It is not necessarily true. I simply do not know yet. It has to be checked, as best as can be done. But here is the story nonetheless.

Lawrence was picked up by the police, who were in plain clothes and driving in a kombi, in Pimville in November. It was early-ish in the morning; he was on his way to school. He knew two of the officers. They were looking for a certain S. Lawrence said he knew where S was because he and S had slept in the same lean-to in Kliptown the previous night.

The policemen, including a female officer, took him into the kombi, handcuffed him, and started whipping him with a sjambok. He asked why. They would not tell him but told him to take them to S. He took the policemen there.

The SAPS personnel then handcuffed S. Three shots then went off - and Lawrence saw S lying on the ground, still handcuffed, with blood oozing out of his chest. At this point, the female policeperson present - and Lawrence is quite clear about whom it was - and he can give you the exact words in the isiZulu in which they were spoken - the female police officer said: "Let's not shoot this one. Let's beat him to death."

The police threw Lawrence, handcuffed, on to S's body and proceeded to beat him with R4 rifle butts and the sjambok and to shoot rubber bullets at him.

Lawrence woke up in the intensive care unit at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital. He asked how long he had been there, unconscious. He was told he'd been there for five days. He was, incidentally, shackled to his bed - because he had been charged with murder - a charge to which we shall return.

Lawrence has his papers from the hospital. They show that he was admitted on such and such a date in November suffering from internal bleeding and massive "contusions".

I asked him if he had any scars to show us. He took off his shirt. I have never seen such frightening upper body scarring before. His scrawny little chest and inside upper arms - where the rubber bullets were fired at him - is nearly all scar tissue. His back is a giant spider's web of scars, from the sjambok.

Lawrence was so badly hurt that he has only in recent weeks been able to feed and wash himself.

What about the murder charge - and the trial for which he is waiting? (Five months now - though this is nothing; another fellow we met at Sun City yesterday morning has been "awaiting trial" since 2004, and there are quite a few like him.) Who is Lawrence supposed to have murdered or helped murder?

Lawrence says he has no idea. No idea at all. He has tried to ask what he was doing in the accused box at Protea Magistrate's Court during his first appearance with five others in February, but he was told to keep quiet.

Like many semi-literate and semi-articulate people, Lawrence often has, without meaning to, a charming turn of phrase. He said yesterday that the murder charge against him was a "plantation" by the police (he meant a "plant") because he had been there when they killed S and they had almost killed him. (One piece of evidence he remembered from his February appearance is that the police said they had found him with the "murder weapon" at his feet in Kliptown.)

Lawrence also inadvertently came out with one of the most accurate comments I have heard about the criminal justice system as it pertains to most people in South African at the moment - "The problem is, sir, I don't have a lawyer because I have a legal aid lawyer ..." - accurate precisely because of its Kafkaesque non-logic.

Reader, beware. I have not honoured the most basic and important element of the law: Audi alteram partem: hear the other side. I have not spoken to the police. In fact I am being unfair to the police. I do not know (yet) who took Lawrence to the hospital and I have not checked (yet) who it was, according to the police, that attacked him.

It could be that Lawrence made this all up - or, since it would be difficult to have made up his scars, that he made up the identity of his torturers. It's possible that the little fellow attacked the police and they had to pacify him because he was so dangerous. It's possible that he was a member of a murderous gang - and that he's just pretending to know nothing about the murder with which he has been charged.

All of these are possibilities. But after eight months of doing this job, I like to think that I have a reasonable grasp of who's lying (about 99 percent of the prisoners to whom I talk) and who's not. And I don't think Lawrence is lying. Besides, even if Lawrence had been part of some murderous gang, that's still not good enough a reason for whipping and shooting him to the point of death.

Anyway, I will speak to the police and I will get to the bottom of this matter if it takes me the next ten years.

I merely wanted to mention it to you, dear readers, by way of telling you about just another day in the office for me - and to explain why, having spoken to Lawrence for some of the morning, having spent half a day at Sun City, I didn't have much of a stomach for being exuberant about those two fresh-faced little ponces that have formed a coalition in the UK or about that gleaming-faced bozo, Little Julie Malema, and the effeminate slap on the wrist he received at party headquarters.

There is a world elsewhere, as Coriolanus said ....

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