When+lawyers+are+investigators,+D+Tweedie,+Business+Day



=When lawyers are investigators=

Dominic Tweedie, Letters, Business Day, Johannesburg, 17 October 2007
Mervyn Bennun is a believer when it comes to the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) but he lacks the guts to confront what the rest of us can plainly see [“//[|Driven by emotion, critics neglect nitty-gritty of law]//” (October 15)].

We have long since noticed an exposed and open rivalry between two armed agencies of the state.

One of these, the NPA, is scheming to arrest the head of the other, the police commissioner. The latter had previously demanded the subordination of the NPA to his command.

The South African commentariat is partisan and divided. Those who continue to urge the NPA to arrest Jackie Selebi would be in an uproar of rage if it were, instead, the police who were attempting to lock up Vusi Pikoli.

Bennun’s carefully selected point of departure is the 1998 act that established the NPA as a hybrid investigative/prosecutorial agency with seniority over the police, and better pay and conditions.

Once the promoters of an investigative judiciary had smuggled it in — hoping to wear down the remainder of the previous system (where police and prosecutorial powers were fully separated) by a slow drip of smears and disparagements — shameless deceptions had to follow.

Legal experts like Bennun are happy to imply that the issue of a warrant, for example, is done on the initiative of an investigating magistrate, and therefore already carries the odium of a conviction, when they are fully aware that we have no such creatures here. Punishments, such as the currently ubiquitous “suspensions”, are held to rightfully precede conviction (whereupon conviction, of course, becomes redundant). Grotesque “plea bargaining” becomes the norm. Solid respect for due process melts into the air.

All of this has followed from a disastrous, disguised, second- guessing and post-constitutional push by some lawyers and judges to extend their turf into the field of investigation.

Dominic Tweedie

Lombardy East

323 words