Legal Sanity Restored in South Africa?
by Guénaël Mettraux
This blog was commenting yesterday on the strange indictment of 270 South African miners on charges of “murdering” 34 of their co-workers who were killed by South African police. The BBC is now reporting that charges against the miners have been “provisionally dropped”.
It might be that a Prosecutor has woken up today to his better judgment and that he remembered the wise words of Glanville Williams that “the lawyer is interested in the causal parentage of events, not in their causal ancestry”. Or it may be that yet another jurisdiction has started rejecting a legal instrument (the “common purpose” doctrine or “joint criminal enterprise” theory) that is so hard to reconcile with principles of individualized justice and almost impossible to fit into the idea of personal culpability. Either way, it is a good step in the right direction…
Or…
http://constitutionallyspeaking.co.za/marikana-no-common-purpose-to-commit-suicide/
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