Word: rumpff
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Shocked Justice. Last week the Gouws brothers faced Judge Frans Rumpff in a crowded courtroom in Pretoria. Both men were charged with murder. The evidence against the Gouws was overwhelming: Joseph had died of "bruises and wounds . . . too numerous to count." But when the defendants pleaded "culpable homicide" (which made it impossible for either of them to be found guilty and punished for murder), the Crown prosecutor agreed...
...Judge Rumpff was shocked. "You have committed a brutal and merciless assault on a boy who was no more than a child," he said. The court sentenced both brothers to eight years in jail and ten strokes with a bamboo cane (not to be raised higher than the shoulder of the striker). And at that the courtroom buzzed, and white women sobbed. Explained a Boer farmer: "To see white men sent to prison and flogged like Kaffirs for killing a thieving Kaffir is the deepest humiliation...
Twenty leaders of South Africa's blacks and coloreds-among them Dr. James S. Moroka, Christian president of the African National Congress-were tried last week for violating the Nationalist government's strict Suppression of Communism Act. Nobody, including Boer Judge Franz Rumpff, thought that Dr. Moroka was a Communist, but the law holds that "any doctrine or scheme . . . which aims at bringing any political, industrial, social or economic change ... by unlawful acts or omissions" is Communism...
...change Dr. Moroka was accused of advocating-namely, racial equality-"has nothing to do with Communism as it is commonly known," said the judge. "The Legislature, for the purpose of suppressing Communism, has enlarged the meaning of Communism. It is not for me to judge the wisdom of legislation . . ." Rumpff found himself obliged to declare all 20 defendants guilty of what he called "statutory Communism," but he promptly suspended all of the sentences...
| 1 |