Comment and analysis: The crisis of criminal justice in South Africa

Abstract

In 2017, I delivered a lecture at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) aimed at confronting a controversial and often overlooked crisis in the criminal justice system – the minimum sentencing regime. While writing that lecture, which forms the basis of this article, I originally entitled it ‘Crisis? What Crisis? Why Criminal Justice is Failing All in South Africa’. Shortly after that, the tragedy of Uyinene Mrwetyana’s death hit South Africa. The anguish of a vulnerable woman at the very University where the lecture was to be delivered having her life brutally ended, in unspeakably nightmarish moments, by the exertion over her of ghastly destructive male dominance, shocked us all to the core. It elicited a national outpouring of grief and rage – and, rightfully, a new demand for answers from our criminal justice system. A whimsical title no longer seemed appropriate. Things are too deadly – deathly – serious.