High Court

A recent decision of Zimbabwe’s high court, sentencing a woman to four life sentences for the murder of her four daughters, aged between one and nine, ended what has been perhaps the most sensational trial in many years. Media reports were full of gruesome details of how the mother had killed her children, murders apparently carried out in response to the increasingly bitter relationship between the parents.

A magistrate’s conviction of a young man accused of stealing a ‘chair plate’ belonging to the National Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ) from a ‘scrapheap’ and sending him to jail for an effective term of 10 years, has been overturned by the high court in Harare. The court, however, also used the occasion to urge that when an accused faces a mandatory minimum sentence, as happened here, they should be entitled to state-funded legal representation.

A prison inmate has won his legal action against the Namibian authorities who confiscated and destroyed wooden craft he had with him in his cell. They have been ordered to pay damages to him – and their interpretation of the law, which formed the basis of their confiscation, has also been shown to have been completely wrong.