Derby-Lewis awaiting his fate
Clive Derby-Lewis, convicted for the murder of Chris Hani in 1993, is awaiting his fate following an application for medical parole.
Clive Derby-Lewis, one of the convicted killers of SA Communist Party leader Chris Hani in the 90s, will know on Friday if his pleas for medical parole had fallen on deaf ears or not.
Lawyers representing Derby-Lewis, who had served almost 21 years of his life sentence for the murder of Hani, argued in the North Gauteng High Court that their client had stage four cancer and had only a few months left to live.
“He wants to die with dignity at home,” they told the court.
However, in opposing his application for medical parole, it was argued that Derby-Lewis had only stage three cancer.
The dispute centres on how sick Derby-Lewis actually is, and whether he is remorseful for his part in killing Hani.
”With respect, he does not have Stage 4 cancer,” said Graham Bester, counsel for Justice and Correctional Services Minister Michael Masutha, who had denied him parole on January 30 this year.
The court was told that in December doctors said the convicted murderer had six months to live.
”There is a question mark, and a serious question mark I submit, with respect against Stage 4 diagnosis,” said Bester.
When Masutha denied him parole in January, the minister said it was because he had not shown remorse, because he had stage three-b lung cancer, and not stage four and that it was not his name on a laboratory report regarding the cancer.
To be considered for medical parole, in terms of the prisons regulations, a prisoner must prove stage four cancer.
Bester took Judge Selby Baqwa through the finer details of Derby-Lewis’ medical report as interpreted by a nuclear medicine expert Dr Mike Sathekge. Sathekge was one of three independent specialists, who had prepared a medical report on him.
Two found that he had stage four lung cancer, and that it had spread to the left adrenal gland.
But Sathekge disagreed, saying though he found evidence of Stage three-b cancer, he could not find evidence of its spread. The spread to another organ or bones ‘outside the neighbourhood’ is what classifies cancer as Stage 4, Bester explained.
Derby-Lewis was first diagnosed in an ”incidental finding” on his lung when he was taken to Eugene Marais Private Hospital to be treated for a stabbing in March 2014.
The report by the three was presented to the Medical Parole Advisory Board, but Derby-Lewis was denied parole.
Bester denied that Derby-Lewis had been treated unfairly regarding the finding that he was not remorseful.
He said Masutha had not received any documents from Derby-Lewis expressing his remorse, even though he knew that Hani’s widow Limpho Hani would oppose his release.
On Monday, Derby-Lewis’ lawyer Roelof du Plessis submitted reams of documents from a pastor, psychologists and social workers repeating that Derby-Lewis was remorseful for what he had done, and for the harm to the Hani family.
He also extended an invitation to Hani’s widow, Limpho, to visit him at the Eugene Marais Private Hospital so that he could apologise to her face to face.
But on Tuesday, Bester said it was not Masutha’s fault that Derby-Lewis’ previous lawyers may have let him down in not getting this information to Masutha.
Hani’s widow, in several media interviews, also expressed the opinion that Derby-Lewis had not revealed the entire truth about the murder of her husband and that there had been a larger conspiracy involved.
“The minister applied his mind,” said Bester.
Derby-Lewis was arrested for providing the gun used by Janusz Walus, a Polish immigrant, to kill Hani in the driveway of his Boksburg home on April 10, 1993.
Derby-Lewis was a member of the Conservative Party at the time.
He was found guilty of conspiracy to murder and sentenced to death, but this was commuted to a life sentence after South Africa abolished capital punishment.
At the time he said he was acting ”in defence of my people, who were threatened with a Communist takeover”. He was also denied amnesty.
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