Word: inquest
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Last week, the South African magistrate in charge of the inquest into Biko's death found that no one connected with the case was guilty of any illegal act or omission. No one, the magistrate ruled, was responsible for Biko's death...
...lawyer was Sydney Woolf Kentridge, one of South Africa's most able trial attorneys; the witness was Colonel Pieter Johannes Goosen, the officer in charge of security police at Port Elizabeth. Their angry exchange in Pretoria last week provided the dramatic high point of an extraordinary public inquest into the death of Black Consciousness Leader Stephen Biko...
...assigned to a galleried courtroom in a former synagogue converted to judicial use several years ago. There each morning Biko's widow Ntsiki and other relatives, still dressed in deep mourning, assembled silently in the front row. Some 250 other spectators packed the remaining seats. Presiding over the inquest was Chief Pretoria Magistrate Martinus Prins. But the man who dazzled the courtroom was Kentridge, 55, a defense veteran of some of South Africa's landmark political trials over the past two decades, whose services were secured by Biko's family...
...most gripping, the inquest took on the aura of a political trial. An excerpt from another duel between Kentridge and Goosen...
...When the inquest continues this week, Kentridge is expected to attempt to show that Biko received his fatal head injury a full day before the alleged struggle with the police. Presumably he will also bear down on the fact that out of 28 affidavits sworn to by policemen and doctors, not one mentioned that Biko had knocked his head against a wall. Kentridge's implicit point: that the story was invented later by one or more of the participants to head off a possible murder charge...