High Court judge Motata guilty of drunk-driving

 

Judge who became infamous for his anti-white hate-speech aired in the court room, is found guilty of drunk driving

September 2 2009 – SAPA reports that Pretoria High Court judge Nkola Motata, 62, was found guilty of drunk driving by the Johannesburg Magistrate's Court on Wednesday.

SAPA reports that after a two-year-long trial, magistrate Desmond Nair found that the five audio recordings and numerous photographs taken of  the Pretoria High Court judge after he ‘d crashed his Jaguar into a Hurlingham wall ‘showed that he was driving under the influence’ of alcohol.

“Audio-recordings worth more than 10,000 words…”

"If a picture tells a thousand words, then audio recordings of this kind tell 10 000 more," the magistrate said in the Johannesburg Magistrate's Court during his summary.

"The decision to prosecute judge Motata has been vindicated," said state prosecutor Zaais van Zyl after magistrate Desmond Nair found Motata guilty of drunken driving -- following a racist incident when the judge crashed into the perimeter wall of a Hurlingham property on January 6, 2007 and started cursing the white owner with very racist language.

Nair acquitted Motata of a lesser, second charge of 'obstructing or defeating the ends of justice or alternatively resisting arrest', however.

Judge was difficult and quarrelsome because he was drunk:

Magistrate Desmond Nair said he could however not find any “criminal intent” on Motata's part to obstruct justice but rather that the judge was just "difficult and quarrelsome because he was drunk".

Asked about the acquittal on these latter, minor charges Van Zyl said: " This case was all along about drunken driving". Motata's defence counsel Bantubonke Tokoto commented that they would decide later on whether to appeal. Motata himself, asked for comment by journalists, said he was well but "you'll never hear anything from me".

The picture left, submitted as court evidence together with other pictures and five audio-recordings, was taken during Motata's Boer-hating rants on January 6, 2007 -- the day he'd crashed his luxury Jaguar against a wall of a Hurlingham property – and testimony from numerous witnesses, including police officers, was that he had been far too drunk to even walk away from the car.

National Prosecuting Authority acting spokesman Mthunzi Mhaga said the NPA also was pleased with the judgment.
"Justice was not only done but manifestly seen to be done," he said. Sentencing will take place on September 9.

• http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=13&art_id=nw20090902135123131C438404
  http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=13&art_id=nw20090902130036500C314423

We first reported about  the cursing judge Nkola John Motata on July 2 2008, when he ‘d appeared in court to listen to three of five audio-recordings made at the scene of his car accident. That day, judge Motata 's recorded 'f*ck the Boer' curses filled the air of the Johannesburg court-room ... shocking everyone within hearing distance. http://www.themercury.co.za/?fSectionId=&fArticleId=nw20080702114432512C475215

“No Boer is going to undermine me, f..k him…’

The audio recordings which were played in the courtroom were made by the owner of the property, Richard Baird, who made them on his cellphone during the hours of altercations which followed between Motata and Baird's tenant after the crash. "We'll repair the damage, it's not a problem," the judge was heard telling businessman Richard Baird's tenant. “However, he [Baird] must not degrade me. No Boer is going to undermine me, f*** him. He mustn't insult me, f*** him, I don't care," Motata said in the recording Baird made on an I-Mate cellphone.

The judge had tried his very best to stop these recordings from being played at his trial at all --  but the Pretoria High Court had dismissed his earlier application to block them.

Baird had made the recordings on his cellphone and then downloaded these clips onto his computer. Some of the recordings were in seTswana and seSotho and Magistrate Desmond Nair had to call in interpreters to translate.

Motata’s defence counsel denied throughout that he had been drunk - and claimed that the state could not prove that he had been -- because there had been a two-hour delay in taking him for blood-tests because of his stubborn refusal to be tested and even removed from his crashed car by police. The court also heard testimony from several police officers that “orders had also been issued 'from up high' to the local police not to arrest the belligerent, drunken motorist..

'THIS WAS THE WHITE MAN'S LAND, BUT IT ISN'T ANY MORE...' said judge Nkola Motata

Baird testified that Motata was ‘ clinging to his crashed Jaguar for support and could not stand by himself'.
Motata was heard to reply in his home-language, Sotho to Baird's suggestion that he was drunk, by saying to Baird's tenant that 'I will pay him for the damage, but he musn't undermine me. A Boer is not going to humiliate me. F*ck him, I don't care any longer. This was the white man's land, but it isn't any more.'  Motata repeats these kind of racist comments to Baird frequently, according to the audio-recordings played in court.

At one stage, the white businessman was heard to reply: "That doesn't matter any more. I have black tenants and black neighbours. ' Then two black female metropolitan police officers showed up to try and calm the judge down and tried to convince him to go for a blood-test. He tells the women: "Why are you standing behind the whites?'
http://www.themercury.co.za/?fSectionId=&fArticleId=nw20080702114432512C475215

                             -----
Northern Cape judge-president Frans Kgomo showed racist anti-Afrikaner bias in murder-case ruling:

Such hatespeech by top officials can often be heard in South Africa these days. For instance, the Northern Cape's  judge-president Frans Kgomo, left -- tipped for a post at SA's highest court – had ‘even allowed his racist bias against Afrikaners to cloud his judicial judgment in an important murder trial...'

This was the unanimous ruling last year by the Supreme Court of Appeals, which also quashed Kgomo's ruling of a murder-conviction and jail-sentence of a local Afrikaner, Joseph le Grange of Prieska.

Kgomo was formally rebuked by a full bench of the land’s highest court for his biased handling of the Afrikaner's racially charged murder trial in Prieska, inthe Northern Cape.

In fact, the Supreme Court of Appeal bench's judges were so disturbed by Northern Cape Judge-President Kgomo's displayed ' hostility and prejudice" towards the accused Afrikaner, whom he had found guilty of stabbing to death 13-year-old Biron Phetlo, that his guilty verdict was quashed and his 24-year prison sentence repealed.

Kgomo comes from Brits, north of Pretoria. He first worked as an interpreter and clerk in the former homeland of Bophuthatswana and was steadily advanced by the apartheid-era's justice system, eventually working his way up as a magistrate.

This decision by the Supreme Court of Appeals finding Kgomo racialy-biased, has widespread legal repercussions: Other decisions on his watch in the Northern Cape division would, in light of this shock-judgment, also have to undergo high-level judicial reviews whenever Kgomo had resided: See some cases:
http://www.saflii.org/za/cases/ZANCHC/2008/ Also: http://www.mg.co.za/article/2008-10-27-concourt-post-still-not-filled

Forced three northern-Cape schools to anglicise:
Kgomo had already shown his anti-Afrikaner bias in a previous ruling in Aug 2004 ordering three Afrikaans-medium schools to anglicise -- in one of the most Afrikaans-speaking regions in the country, where less than 3% of the population actually uses English as a primary language…

• The Kalahari High School and Seodin Primary School in Kuruman and the Noord-Kaapland Agricultural High School in Jan Kempdorp had challenged the provincial education department 's decision to force a small number of English-speaking pupils into their school, which effectively has now turned these schools into dual-medium educational facilities - and they lost their case thanks to the judge's decision.

The school's governing bodies had argued that it was their constitutional right to teach in the language of their choice - which indeed it is. They also argued that not enough resources - teachers, money and classrooms - to execute dual medium education successfully in this overwhelmingly Afrikaans-speaking, low-income region could be provided and that all the pupils' educational standards would suffer as a result of the high costs which would be involved.

• However, delivering what he said was his final judgment, Kgomo proclaimed that the Afrikaans parents' evidence, submitted to his court, that only Afrikaans-medium schools were targetted by the local provincial education department, had been "wrong and over-simplistic."
  http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/News/0,,2-7-1442_1822506,00.html

He was preconceived, biased...
Five of the Supreme Court of appeal court's judges, led by Judge Nathan Ponnan, ruled unanimously that Judge Kgomo's approach to the Afrikaner defendant Joseph le Grange's murder trial was "certainly suggestive of one who has certain preconceived biases and allows those biases to affect his judgment".

Judge Kgomo, who had been put forward by the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) as a possible Constitutional Court justice post and at this time, was serving as an acting Supreme Court of Appeal judge, had in their view, breached the most primary "canons of good judicial behaviour" and “virtually taken over as a prosecutor in the case’,  they said.

• The judges ruled that the state 'could reinstate charges against Le Grange, his son Pieter and his son's friend Hendrik van der Westhuizen', who were convicted as accessories after the fact to the murder, as long as Judge Kgomo did "not take part in such proceedings".
• It was the state's case that Le Grange had fatally stabbed Phetlo, a golf caddie, after he, his son and Van der Westhuizen had spotted the 13-year-old and his friend attempting to steal items from a sports shop.
• According to Phetlo's 14-year-old friend Curtis Maritz's testimony, Pieter le Grange accused the boys of having previously stolen from a local greengrocer.
• Curtis said Phetlo tried to flee but was prevented from doing so by Joseph le Grange, who pinned the boy back with his "sword cane". Joseph le Grange then allegedly unsheathed the blade of his sword cane and stabbed Phetlo three times. Curtis claimed he had tried to get away to alert the police, but was prevented by Van der Westhuizen. He said the boys' three attackers then ran away.

Joseph le Grange has always denied stabbing the boy, although he and the other two men did confront him over his stealing. His testimony was supported by two other witnesses: his son and Van der Westhuizen.

The appeal court bench found that Judge Kgomo appeared "at an early stage to have made up his mind that the state witnesses were telling the truth and (the Afrikaners, Joseph le Grange and his co-accused) were lying".

• He asked leading questions from the Bench to descredit the Afrikaners:
  The appeal court noted that transcripts of the judge's cross-examination of the accused men was "replete with questions that were intended to discredit (the Afrikaner accused), compounded in many instances by disbelief and scepticism".

The appeal court also criticised Judge Kgomo for his 'furious reaction' to the defence's suggestion that his little friend Maritz might have been responsible for Phetlo's death."On record there is absolutely no grain of evidence to remotely justify this suggestion," Judge Kgomo said. "All the accused have repeated this preposterous accusation in the reports to the social workers, the Correctional Services officer and the clinical psychologist.

• "They did this despite my finding - showing why the accusation was absurd. I take a dim view of the fact that Curtis Maritz was accused by the accused of being the murderer. Counsel should not in good conscience have argued this point. I have no doubt that it is defamatory of Curtis Maritz and an aggravating factor against the accused," he had fumed from the bench. According to the appeal court the judge's comments in this regard were 'not suggestive of an open judicial mind".

Race row at bench:

This had not been Judge Kgomo's first brush with racism and controversy. In 2006 he also ignited an acrimonious race row when he lodged an unsuccesful complaint with the JSC, demanding that judges Steven Majiedt and Hennie Lacock be axed for misconduct after they allegedly insulted him.

• Kgomo will also be remembered for his judgements in two landmark cases dealing with same-sex equality.
  The first case was Judge Kathy Satchwell who fought for the right of her same-sex partner to benefit from her pension payout. He disallowed this ruling as being 'unconstitutional' and his judgment was confirmed by the Constitutional Court.
• The second case was of the famous SA sculptress and judge Anna-Marie de Vos, who successfully sought an order declaring that lesbian couples might adopt children. The couple won the case - apparently the first lesbian couple in the world to do so. http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=13&art_id=vn20080919055151520C410007

Anti-white racist blather on South African websites:

For instance, on http://www.africans.co.za: it says : 

“It has been a long while since I wrote about everything that is so sickeningly wrong with white people (part 1, part 2, and part 3), but I fear that just like an inflamed pimple ready to let out the pus, those crazy whites are rearing their pale nonsense filled heads again. As a patriot I have long resigned myself to listening to whites moan about the state of this country since real Africans took over. While they usually phrase their vicious lies with erudition, it doesn't take a genius to see through their self serving babble - every concern they ever raise, be it about corruption, crime, the environment, women's rights, road safety, AIDS treatments, Jacob Zuma, Thabo Mbeki, Zimbabwe, to name but a few, are only rooted in their wish to screw real South Africans out of money and dignity…”

"They (whites) all lust after money, and they are all as pale and hideous to the eye as swollen maggot feasting on the eye of an African child indirectly starved to death as a result of European colonisation..."

Euro-pirates...
And more: "With our current financial fluctuations and high unemployment, it seems to me that all those jobs occupied by complaining euro-pirates and foreigners should be given to real South Africans.
"These bastard grub people keep moaning about the SA government, the lack of SA standards under black rule, and the crime! If they are so concerned, then I would like to suggest that we send the whole bellyaching lot of them back to wherever they came from.

Threat of genocide:
More quotes: " I'm sure our well equipped armed forces could assist in nudging them off on their voyage back to Europe, and it would also create jobs, as we would need true South Africans to redecorate their hideous homes and make them fit for natives of this land."... and more of the same vile language.

Advocates aborting white babies:  'easier to kill'
The site also features an 'advertisement' with pictures of white babies -- advocating their abortion as 'they're easier to kill before they are born'... It also echoes the racist comments by ANC-parliamentarians that 'whites who whinge about crime, should just leave the country.'

They write: "with our current financial fluctuations and high unemployment, it seems to me that all those jobs occupied by complaining euro-pirates and foreigners should be given to real South Africans.

• "These bastard grub people keep moaning about the SA government, the lack of SA standards under black rule, and the crime! If they are so concerned, then I would like to suggest that we send the whole bellyaching lot of them back to wherever they came from... " There's much more hate-speech, but it's to nauseating to reproduce here. http://www.africans.co.za/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1292

http://censorbugbear-reports.blogspot.com/2008/09/black-sa-judge-ruled-biased-by-sa-court.html