2003: Lehlohonolo Bernard Kobedi
July 18th, 2013 Headsman
Ten years ago today, Botswana controversially hanged a South African national named Lehlohonolo Bernard Kobedi.
Kobedi was one of three men in a vehicle whose shootout with pursuing police left Sergeant Kebotsetswe Goepamang dead in the village of Palapye in 1993; despite insisting that the lethal bullet was not his, Kobedi was condemned for the homicide.
He resided thereafter on death row in relative obscurity. He was there in December 1999 when white South African emigre Mariette Bosch was sentenced to die, and he was still there 16 months later when she hanged. Bosch’s high-profile case, to hear Kobedi’s lawyer explain it, cast a pall over her client.
“I think it was at that very moment he started feeling that execution was a reality,” Themba Joina* told South African press. “You can imagine what he went through on realising that even international pressure and threats could not save Bosch.”
Kobedi would not enjoy such publicity. “The foreign media were only concerned about Bosch because she is white. Since she was hanged, we don’t see cameras in Botswana anymore,” Joina said.
Even so, he fought zealously for his client. Supported by the Botswana human rights organization DITSHWANELO, Joina mounted (pdf) both a claim of Kobedi’s actual innocence and a challenge to the constitutionality of Botswana’s death penalty. The country’s high court turned him down early in 2003.
It must have been a terrible ordeal for Kobedi. Packed four to a cell, and bracing every morning for the prospect of a sudden execution, the South African was finally put to death in secrecy the morning of July 18, 2003.
“I got cold. I had no hope at all,” one of his cellmates remembered of the hanging-day. But it’s a narrow space between life and death, and this fellow with only one frightening degree of separation from the gallows was the very next week cleared of his charges and released.
* Joina also happens to preside over a Marxist political party.
On this day..
- 1980: Winfried Baumann - 2020
- 1743: The Black Watch mutineers - 2019
- 1726: Franz Laubler, Hermann Joachim Hahn's murderer - 2018
- 1888: Two in New Jersey, by father and son hangmen - 2017
- 1741: Othello, Doctor Harry, and five other New York slaves - 2016
- 1707: John Whittingham - 2015
- 1801: Chloe - 2014
- 1936: Virgilio Leret, the first shot in the Spanish Civil War - 2012
- 1300: Gerard Segarelli, Apostolic Brethren founder - 2011
- 1943: Eight from the Krasnodar Trials - 2010
- 1865: Chief Ahan of the Tsilhqot’in - 2009
- 2007: Not Sina Paymard, saved by a flute - 2008
Entry Filed under: 21st Century,Botswana,Capital Punishment,Common Criminals,Crime,Death Penalty,Execution,Hanged,Murder
I’m still trying to come to terms that my father is gone,especially considering he was executed secretly without the knowledge of his lawyer
my father didnt deserve to die like that know my life seems so hopeless without him
It’s typical of the hypocritical ANC regime in South Africa that — as far as I know — no attempt to apply pressure on Botswana was made. Almost twenty years ago the South African Constitutional Court struck down capital punishment in South Africa. There is therefore an obligation on the Executive to do everything in its power to prevent South African citizens being subjected to this Medieval horror. South Africa is in a strong position to apply pressure on Botswana. I wonder why they did not bother?