Rape convict learns the hard way

Sharon Mathala | Friday February 7, 2014 15:42

Molatlhegi Jonas was convicted and sentenced to 20 years for rape and five years for robbery both of which run concurrently.  However, he was contesting his rape sentence saying that it was too 'stiff'.  The Court of Appeal found that Jonas knew of his HIV status prior to the rape incident though he denies this. Court of Appeal judges Elijah Legwaila, Monametsi Gaongalelwe and David Newman agreed with a Selebi-Phikwe principal magistrate's decision to impose the 20-year sentence. 

“It is not within the powers of this court to reduce the sentence in the absence of exceptional extenuating circumstances. The appellant's HIV positive status is not an exceptional extenuating circumstance,” said Legwaila.

Legwaila explained that a rape sentence may be affected by the discovery of the accused’s HIV status.   In this case the accused was later found to be HIV positive and had admitted during court proceedings that he had knowledge of his HIV status a month before the rape incident. “The evidence came from the appellant himself during trial, and boldly without prompting, testified that in May 2006, he went to Tsetsebjwe to check his HIV status,” Legwaila said, adding that Jonas received news that he was HIV positive about a month before the offence was committed.

Legwaila said that Jonas sought to deny that he had told the court he had been found to be HIV positive a month before the offence was committed. The evidence is part of the record whose accuracy has no reason to be doubted.

On June 5, 2006 at Tsetsebjwe, Jonas raped the complainant.  He was then sentenced to 20 years in prison.  In his grounds of appeal, he submitted that he was tried and convicted for the offence of rape whose sentence is not the enhanced minimum of 20 years but the ordinary minimum of 10 years imprisonment. He also argued that the magistrate court, prior to the trial, should have warned him of the risk of being sentenced to an enhanced sentence on conviction.  He said that had he known of this he would have not taken the matter lightly.  He would have engaged legal representation, Jonas said.