‘Malephane seems to be a great scriptwriter’
Muzikayise Malephane’s testimony once again took centre stage at the South Gauteng High Court last week during closing arguments in the trial against Ntuthuko Shoba.
Muzikayise Malephane’s testimony once again took centre stage at the South Gauteng High Court last week during closing arguments in the trial against Ntuthuko Shoba.
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Making his submissions before the court, Shoba’s lawyer said Malephane was capable of saying anything to save himself and asked the judge to consider everything told the court to be untrustworthy, unreliable and untrue. “It is not for his lordship to do a cherry picking exercise in order to try and find credibility,” Shoba’s lawyer said of Malephane’s testimony.
That submission was however challenged by Acting Judge Stuart Wilson who said it was the duty of the court to evaluate Malephane’s evidence carefully with circumspection and seek corroboration before making a decision.
Judge Wilson went on to say that conclusions cannot be made based on the lies Malephane told and automatically reject the rest of his testimony.
“So what I call sorting the wheat from the chaff and what you call cherry picking is really an exercise of the court. It is required to analyse Mr Malephane’s testimony as a whole and to consider first of all whether it is so tainted that it has to be rejected in its entirety. But if it is not so tainted that it has to be rejected in its entirety, decide which parts can be safely accepted and which parts can be rejected,” said Judge Wilson.
Shoba’s lawyer went on to make a submission that even if the court was inclined to find some credibility in Malephane’s testimony, there were inherent risks involved in trying to do that because of Malephane’s obsession with seeing Shoba being dealt with.
According to Shoba’s lawyer, the motive for Malephane’s obsession with seeing his client go down is because he believes he sold him out.
During his sentencing last year and testimony during the trial this year, Malephane told the court that he was hired by Shoba to kill his then eight months pregnant girlfriend.
Shoba pleaded not guilty to all charges brought against him and denies having any interactions with Malephane beyond buying cigarettes from him during lockdown level five.
Shoba’s lawyer accused Malephane of wanting to implicate his client based on a, “fictitious contract to kill which has lots of potholes when probed further.”
The judge ask why would Malephane make up a fictitious contract and the lawyer responded by saying that “Malephane seems to be a great scriptwriter.”
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