Apartheid should not be blamed for our own shortcomings
Remember the story of the kid who murdered his parents and was found guilty by the courts? His lawyer pleaded for leniency on the grounds that his client was an orphan.
Or the guy convicted of drunken driving who pleaded for leniency because he had been under the influence of alcohol?
These thoughts popped up as I considered the case of Azikiwe Kambule, the Soweto-born youth who sparked an international campaign to save him from the death sentence.
The story, as far as I can piece it together, is skeletal. Kambule, 18, and three friends, Santario Berry, 21, Rudy Rhodes, 19, and Pammy Porter, 19, were charged in Jackson, Mississippi, with the murder of Pamela McGill, 31, in January 1996. McGill was kidnapped outside her home, driven in her own car to the wooded area of Madison County, and shot dead.
Kambule was arrested a week later after police received word that Berry had been trying to sell the car.
Berry pleaded guilty to the murder. By waiving his right to a trial by jury, he avoided the state's mandatory death penalty for murder. He also testified that Kambule had motivated him to commit the crime.
Kambule told the judge that the incident started when Berry decided he wanted McGill's red 1993 Dodge Stealth sports car.
The two followed her home from a bank, where she had made a withdrawal from an automated teller machine, and abducted her at gunpoint.
Kambule said McGill cried and pleaded for her life as she was taken to the wooded area of Madison County where Berry shot her in the head.
With Kambule facing execution for his role, the Washington-based National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty took up his case, roping in the support of Amnesty International, Bianca Jagger, Desmond Tutu, and a cast of thousands.
The NCADP said he was facing the death penalty for a crime in which he was little more than a bystander.
He was also, they said, the victim of race-charged Mississippi politics and of a skewed criminal justice system in which 66% of those sentenced to death as children have been from racial minorities.
Kambule eventually pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to 30 years for car-jacking and five years for being an accessory after the fact to murder.
There have since been outraged cries that the sentence was too harsh, and that Kambule should be brought home to South Africa to serve his sentence.
I'm inherently suspicious of the American criminal justice system. It is, after all, the country which has the dubious distinction of being at the top of the list of those that execute their own citizens. A disproportionately high number of those are black.
But Pamela McGill was a black woman, a state social worker. Her family called for the maximum sentence. This cannot be called a racist plot.
Kambule's mother told the judge that her son had "fallen in with the wrong crowd".
This does not explain why did he not go to the authorities or tell his mother before he was arrested.
The NCADP has said in Kambule's defence that he was a victim of human rights abuses under apartheid.
This offends me. Are we to allow history to reduce the evil of apartheid to ridicule because of our refusal to accept that even a victim is capable of a moral decision?
I agree with Thabo Mbeki. It's the Americans who have been wronged. Kambule is in prison according to their laws. There he should stay.