Capital punishment in South Africa was abolished on 6 June 1995 by the ruling of the Constitutional Court in the case of S v Makwanyane, following a five-year and four-month moratorium since February 1990.
Description
The standard method for carrying out executions was hanging, sometimes of several convicts at the same time. Mandatory death penalty for murder was abolished in 1935. At the same time, criminal justice saw an increased racialisation in disfavour of the non-white majority, who represented the vast majority of accused and convicted in capital cases. Hanging was maintained following the instatement of a republic in 1961. At approximately the same time South Africa saw mounting international criticism against purposely political executions of anti-apartheid activists convicted of violent crimes, mainly of blacks, but in some cases of whites, such as Frederick John Harris in 1965. The 1980s saw a rapid increase in the number of executions; 164 in 1987 alone. Since 1959, the South African government officially performed 2,949 hangings, including 1,123 in the 1980s. Out of more than one hundred South Africans executed in 1988, only three were white. Despite the grim statistics, not all capital cases ended with execution; of 83 black South Africans convicted of killing whites between June 1982 and June 1983 some 38 were hanged, as well as one white convicted of killing a white. Executions were carried out in Pretoria Central Prison; condemned prisoners were held in a section of the prison called "The Pot". The last execution carried out by the South African government was the hanging of Solomon Ngobeni in November 1989. The last woman executed was Sandra Smith on 2 June the same year along with her boyfriend Yassiem Harris, in all cases following a murder conviction. In February 1990, a moratorium was declared by President De Klerk. Two further executions were, however, carried out in the nominally independent "homelands" of Boputhatswana and Venda in 1990 and 1991 respectively. Although the death penalty was abolished in 1995, opinion polls suggest significant public support for its reinstatement. A 2014 poll in South Africa found that 76 percent of millennium generation South Africans support re-introduction of the death penalty.
