BULAWAYO – The High Court has quashed a Tsholotsho magistrate’s decision that condemned a 25-year-old serial housebreaker to nearly two decades in jail, blasting the trial court’s sentencing as “irrational, excessive and incomprehensible.”
Justices Munamato Mutevedzi and Bongani Ndlovu, sitting at the Bulawayo High Court, ruled that Herman Ndebele’s original sentence of 18 years and 10 months for 15 counts of unlawful entry reflected a “haphazard” and “self-defeating” approach by the magistrate.
“My view is that even in cases where an offender is an incorrigible criminal convicted of numerous counts of a serious offence, he still deserves to be sentenced rationally,” said Justice Mutevedzi in the judgment. “The approach adopted by the trial magistrate in this case was akin to simply rearranging the chairs on the Titanic. It achieved little, if anything.”
Ndebele, who pleaded guilty to five counts and was convicted on nine others, had faced a patchwork of fragmented sentences, some tied to restitution as little as US$9 or ZAR50, and others linked to sums as large as ZAR45,538. The High Court said the disparities exposed “thumb-suck” sentencing.
“For example, in count 4, six months were suspended if the offender restituted US$9, yet in count 15, five months were suspended for ZAR45,538,” Mutevedzi noted. “By any standard, the amounts of prejudice in the cited counts cannot be equated to the suspended terms of imprisonment. The suspension periods were nothing but thumb sucks.”
Although the judges acknowledged Ndebele’s record as a repeat offender—he was already serving an activated eight-month term from a prior conviction—they found the lower court failed to strike a balance between punishment and fairness.
“An offender must not be visited with a sentence that is intended to break him,” Justice Mutevedzi said. “Even if by some miracle he managed to restitute the complainants, the effective sentence of 10 years and 4 months was still manifestly excessive. It would leave the offender not only broken but also hopeless.”
The High Court replaced the magistrate’s ruling with a consolidated seven-year jail term, to run consecutively with the previously suspended eight months. Ndebele will now serve an effective sentence of seven years and eight months.
“The sentences imposed by the trial court were a maze,” the judges concluded. “It is improbable that the unrepresented offender understood their import because even a trained mind would struggle to do so.”
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