Werner Menges
2 December 2008
THE youthfulness of an 18-year-old Mariental resident who has been convicted on two rape charges that date back to 2005 saved him from being sentenced to more than a four-year prison term at the end of his trial in the High Court in Windhoek last week.
Acting Judge Alfred Siboleka convicted the young suspect, who was 15 years old at the time that the crimes were committed, on two counts of rape on October 28.
On Friday, Acting Judge Siboleka sentenced him to four years' imprisonment on the first charge and an additional two-year sentence on the second count, but ordered that two years of the cumulative sentence would be conditionally suspended for a period of four years.
Because he was still a juvenile at the time that the crimes were committed, the convicted young man cannot be identified.
In his judgement in which he found the youngster guilty, Acting Judge Siboleka found that he had raped a five-year-old girl near Mariental on September 30 2005.
After that incident, he was arrested, charged, and - because of his status as a juvenile - released into the care of his parents.
A week and a half after the first incident, the boy then repeated the first crime - this time by raping a six-year-old boy at the Fish River near Mariental, the court found.
After that incident, he was kept in custody for about a month before being released to await the start of his trial.
When he addressed the court on the sentence that was to be imposed in the case, Deputy Prosecutor General Orben Sibeya suggested that a 10-year prison term had to be imposed on each of the two charges, and that these jail terms had to run consecutively.
In his opinion, Acting Judge Siboleka said with the sentencing, an effective 20-year prison sentence would be too severe for a youth who was also a first offender.
Acting Judge Siboleka also did not agree with a suggestion from the young man's defence lawyer, Unanisa Hengari, that a suspended sentence would have been appropriate in his case.
In a rape case, a custodial sentence had to be imposed to mark the gravity of the offence, to emphasise the disapproval of society, to serve as a warning to others, to punish the offender and to protect the survivors of these crimes, Acting Judge Siboleka said.
The crime of rape is so serious that even in a case involving a juvenile offender any sentence short of a prison term could not be justified in most cases, he added.
Had it not been that the convicted young man had been 15 years old at the time he committed the crimes, the court would have considered a more severe prison term than the one it decided on, Acting Judge Siboleka said.
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