A SONG IN THE MORNING Read Free Page A

above Pritchard Street.

    * * •
Mr Justice Andries van Zyl had passed the sentence of the supreme penalty on 186 men, of whom his clerk had told him recently 142 had been executed. It would have been beyond him to believe that an innocent man had ever been convicted in a court over which he had presided. He attended church every Sunday morning and sometimes went back in the evening. When he retired in two years' time he would devote his energies to a charitable society supporting children afflicted by the spina bifida disease. Privately, in his room, after passing the death sentence, he would say a prayer for the condemned man; not a prayer that the man should be reprieved, but that he might go to his Maker with true repentance in his heart.
    On that late afternoon in the Palace of Justice on the north side of Pretoria's Church Square he dealt first with the four Blacks deemed guilty by himself and his two lay assessors of murder. There was no theatricality. The black cap had long before been dispensed with in the Republic's courts, and his sentencing voice was a racing monotone, that of a bowls club secretary getting through the minutes of a previous meeting.
    As Happy and Charlie and Percy and Tom stared back at him from the dock, expressionless, exhausted of hope, he shuffled his papers, then pressed his metal-rimmed half moon spectacles tight onto the bridge of his nose. He allowed the murmurs to subside in the public gallery.
    He looked up at Jeez Carew.
    Mr Justice van Zyl saw a man only a few years younger than himself, and well dressed in a dark grey suit and a white shirt and a silk tie. He saw a face which seemed to say that there was nothing new to be learned. He saw the way that the shoulders were pulled back, and the way that the man's arms were held straight down to his sides. He saw that the prisoner's bearing was more militarily correct than that of the prison service guards at attention behind him.
    Mr Justice van Zyl had watched this White accused through seventeen days of court room business. He thought he had detected an arrogance. He disliked arrogance. The previous day he had decided that when he passed sentence on the White he would make a fuller statement than was usual for him. He would break that arrogance.
    "James Carew, you have been found guilty of murder without extenuating circumstances. There is only one sentence that I may pass upon you. It was your own decision that during your time in custody you refused to co-operate with the officers who have diligently investigated a quite appalling criminal act. You chose to remain silent. You have also rebuffed the efforts of a very able and conscientious counsel to present a defence on your behalf. I understand that you chose not to brief him, and also that you refused the opportunity offered you of going into the witness stand to give the court your own version of events on that horrific day in Johannesburg. By these actions I am forced to the conclusion that in your case extenuating circumstances do not exist which would mitigate your guilt.
    "I have heard in police evidence that you came from the United Kingdom to the Republic of South Africa twelve years ago. In the time you have resided here perhaps you have acquired the belief that different standards of justice obtain for our varied ethnic groups. You may have believed that the colour of your skin offers you some protection from the consequences of your actions. You would have deluded yourself, Mr Carew, if you believed that.
    The crime of which you have been found guilty involved a quite dastardly act. You acted together with terrorists of the outlawed African National Congress, one of whom had been trained in sabotage and murder in a communist state, to set off a bomb inside the Rand Supreme Court in Johannesburg. The bomb consisted of explosives and petrol to which had been added a quantity of household liquid detergent, the effect of the latter being that the flaming petrol would fasten