Special Hearings — Health Sector Hearings — 1997-06-17

DAVID JOSEPH KLATZOW: Mr Commissioner, thank you for the opportunity of allowing me to address the Commission.  It has been a deeply humbling experience to hear this morning the testimony of others who have clearly suffered far more than I have suffered, which is not at all.  The work which I have done seems so minimal in relation to what I hear before me this morning.
 But in a small way I would like to make this offering to show you what was done and in a way, almost as a cathartic experience for myself to get rid of some of the anger of the things that have happened in the past and which I may well not have done enough to prevent their happening.
 This submission has been the end process of a great deal of thought, extending over many years and after much consideration I have decided to mention the broad topics and to avoid the mention of names.  I don't have to expand on the fact that the mentioning of names has created, or the thought that there might have been mentioning of names, has created a great deal of agitation, as was evidenced by that worthy gentleman's submission a few seconds before I gave evidence.  But the persons and people that I will be referring to, in any event, know just who they are.  And as the purpose of this Commission and this hearing is above all reconciliation I cannot see any good that will come out of the names being mentioned.  They will, in any event, give rise to a welter of accusations, denials and counter-accusations would, in my view, obscure the true point of my submission.
 This is, in essence, to make the community at large and the legislators aware, and as much as I can do in my small part, of the way in which forensic science failed the community that it was bounden to serve, and how these failures resulted in the eventual support of the evils of the system which are now coming to the public attention, largely as a result of the efforts of the TRC.
 It should be explained that forensic science is the parent discipline and may be divided into a number of sub-specialities, forensic medicine being one of these, as are blood grouping, forensic blood grouping, serology, DNA testing, ballistics, fire investigation and a host of other specialities.  And they have in common, all of them, one thing, they are all subject to the laws of science and these laws are flouted at some considerable peril, as I can give evidence on from bitter personal experience.
 It's impossible to separate out the different categories of forensic science into watertight compartments as they all function together in the judicial system, and the inter-linkages were so intimate as to make the task of separating them both unfruitful and illogical.  
 A forensic post mortem would have several of the other specialities involved in it, and for instance there was no point in taking a bullet out of a deceased unless it was subjected to other forensic tests, and the whole system was coordinated to form a coherent end point.  
 In each category, and my submission is about forensic science in general, including forensic medicine, in each category the system failed to deliver an impartial service to the community.  Each part of the system became so integrally part of the police, and they in turn were such an integral part of the system of repression that eventually the whole forensic science service came to be part of that repressive and shameful system that was apartheid.
 I would like to illustrate from cases in which I have been personally involved just some of the points made so far.  
 When I first went into practice in 1984 I spent some time attempting to get the State to alter the way in which blood was taken for the analysis of blood alcohol, and after some correspondence with the Deputy Attorney General in Johannesburg, and a string of acquittals the system was changed to that which I had advised all along.  The nett effect of all of this was to make me a set of extraordinary vituperative enemies in the forensic science service countrywide.
 I vividly remember one of the pathologists from the State Mortuary in Johannesburg relaying the comments of a senior member of that laboratory after he, the pathologist, had been observed in conversation with me.  "Don't" said the senior man, "speak to that bastard, the State are gunning for him".  That's as it was to be for some time. 
 I failed to see the reason for this attitude, but even more so I failed to see and understand why that senior man, who made that comment, failed to recuse himself from a matter in which I was giving evidence and in which he was sitting as an assessor.  
 In addition that same man, vigorously over the years, opposed any efforts on my part, ever, to obtain first-hand evidence from any post mortems that were done under his control in various fields of interest to me.  And if there was ballistic evidence to be had I was excluded on the grounds that I was not medically qualified, and that only medically qualified people were allowed to attend medico-legal post mortems.  There were many others who attended post mortems at this time who were not registered with the Medical and Dental Council.  
 And the failure of the State pathologists to allow the family proper representation and proper expert assistance for the pathologists who did get into the post mortems on behalf of the family always put the deceased's family at a disadvantage and made the work for the family representatives very difficult indeed.  
 An example of this was during the middle eighties when in Natal a police constable was shot dead by his colleagues under very questionable circumstances.  The State pathologist who was in charge of the post mortem simply refused me access to the post mortem and went out of his way to hinder the appointment of a pathologist for the family.   At the time he was unwilling to delay his post mortem to allow for the travel arrangements of the family pathologist, and every possible obstacle was put in my way, to the point where the State pathologist made insulting and derogatory comments about the experience of the family pathologist.  
 By the time that we eventually got representation at the post mortem, by the time the post mortem was done, and by the time we could get our pathologist in at the same time as it were, but it was later in the day, the car had been hosed down, in which the shooting had taken place, and vital evidence appeared to have been destroyed forever.
 During the Ashley Kriel inquest one of the State pathologists sat on the bench as an assessor and this particular individual had occupied a chair in forensic medicine at one of our universities and thus I would have expected him to have more than a nodding acquaintance with research methodology and experimental design, and this was not shown to be the case in the subsequent enquiry.
 The facts, as I am sure you will well know, are briefly as follows.  Informers had led the police to a house where Ashley Kriel was staying, and when an arrest was attempted Kriel allegedly produced a pistol and during the scuffle he got shot in the back with his own pistol and died on the spot.
 It became crucial to estimate the distance between the muzzle of the weapon and the body at the time of discharge. Kriel was wearing a tracksuit top and a T-shirt, and the bullet traversed both sets of clothing to inflict a fatal wound in the heart.  There were certain stigmata on the body which suggested that the wound was a close-contact shot and thus supported the police version.  
 However, the hole in Kriel's clothing through which the bullet had passed was small, it was indeed calibre size, and this was inexplicable because when a weapon is placed up against clothing and discharged under the conditions that were described it invariably tore a large rent in the clothing as a result of the hot gases which emanate from the muzzle of the weapon.  The hole in Kriel's clothing clearly did not fit this, and was extremely perturbing to me.  The State were also clearly perturbed by the findings and sent their ballistics expert to perform exhaustive tests, 200 shots were fired.  
 The exact words used by this expert at the inquest are reproduced here because they give much more meaning and substance to my views than anything that I could say.   I want to quote from page 171 of the transcript of the inquest and the syntax is not mine.
"Your Honour, the purpose was to make sure that I am correct".
What a wonderfully directed way to start your experiment.  
 The forensic individual goes on to say,
"Your Honour what I have tried to do was to determine the physical evidence of the holes in the clothes and I tested it on a sandbag for example, it gave me the best result.  I was successful to prove that the hole must have been a close-range shot".
 Later the expert expands on his experimental technique still further, and the method in which he recorded his results in a scientific manner.
"Each and every time you shoot a test and it doesn't work and then to try and record it all doesn't make sense if it doesn't work.  I recorded what I saw and I made the reports and I made the notes".
Page 198 of the Kriel inquest.
 We have further revelation from this so-called expert on page 199.
"I wanted to shoot a close range shot on the right background and in the right way without tearing the hole as it is torn where you see it there".
And the expert goes on to say just how important the background was by saying at line 28 on page 199 as follows:
"I started realising with my tests that what I have behind the cloth has a big influence on what happens to the cloth".
 In answer to the questions posed by the presiding magistrate the following is of great enlightenment.
"And if you take the firm part of the pig's stomach and you shoot through that did you find similar evidence?
 No the close range shots blew out, it made large holes".
 And further the Court says the following:
"In other words only the sandbag gave you the same effect as your evidence of the close-range shot?
 That is correct".
 Now let me try and explain to you what was happening here.  The expert on the other side clearly understood and knew that the background in which you performed your experiments had to be exactly that as was the case when Kriel was shot.  You had to deal with skin, with unresisting, yielding material such as skin.  He realised that you could get different results on the clothing depending on what background you had.  And so he altered the parameters of the experiment in such a way that he could obtain the result that he wanted and in so doing refute my evidence, which is in fact quite the opposite, he didn't refute it, he proved, instead of firing ten shots or 20 shots as I had done, he fired 200 shots and proved exactly what I had found.
 This evidence, if one can call it that, was given before one of the forensic science doyens.  It was given in front of a magistrate, and nowhere in the subsequent judgment or in the subsequent questioning is a single question raised about this nonsense.  
 I would like to make the following comments about this and to say what I see the experimental as it was for this expert.
1. Keep only those results which agree with your pre-conceptions.
 2. Alter the parameters until the desired result is obtained.
 3. Start off with the desired result in mind and don't stop until its obtained by whatever method.  Use a pea-shooter if the gun won't do it for you.
 Nowhere is this excruciating unscientific approach commented on by the Bench, and this sort of experimental design would get a standard 6 pupil failed for total lack of comprehension.  Why did the assessor not comment on these experiments?  Why did he allow this charade to continue without adverse comment?
 That the distance was of considerable relevance was clear, otherwise neither I nor the State would have expended so much energy on the issue.  It's quite clear that the Court and the police expert had a problem with this hole in Kriel's clothing.  
 The Court itself became involved in this, and clearly after I had challenged the Police expert on the nature of his tests and the lack of any controlled evidence, the Assessor and the Court clearly didn't understand what was meant by control.  Because the last question asked to me by the Court in this was quite illuminating.  This question was,
"Did you have a control for the shots that you fired through the clothing?"
Now once you have set up the identical conditions, that itself is the controlled experiment and clearly this magistrate didn't understand that.  And it's difficult to convey to this hearing the smug satisfaction with which that final question was put to me by the Court.  It was as though the Court had caught me in a fatal flaw in my own experiment design, and yet all it had done was to underscore the total scientific illiteracy of the man asking the question.
 It's interesting now to read the judgment in that case, where the Court, presumably with the concurrence of the Assessor makes the following finding on page 10, line 12.
"The entrance wound in the clothes shows irregular size".
With the greatest of respect that was not what the argument was about.  The Magistrate's very question to the expert showed that he understood what the question was about earlier, and yet he makes this finding subsequently in the judgment when nothing can be done to alter it, when nothing can be done to change the misconceptions for posterity which he created by this.
 This should be compared with the passage supra in line 28, line 30 where I say it's very difficult to argue with this kind of finding, plucked out of the air and supported by no evidence.  The Police had a problem, namely with a contact shot, no tests that they produced could support their position, and in order to sustain their version they had to falsify the experimental design and this was done without a murmur from the assessor and indeed with the active connivance of the Bench.  When the Magistrate pulled the legal rabbit of the particular nonsense about the torn edges of the wound out of the hat, there was nothing that anybody could do about it.
 It just shows what anybody who opposed the State were up against in those dark days.  
 And one is reminded of that hard-pressed advocate of Louis XVI who commented wryly when he came to court to seek judges, and he said "I found only prosecutors."
 There were many other problems with the marks on Ashley Kriel's body.  The angle of the burn was incompatible with the angle of the pattern on the skin.  The size of the mark should have been smaller than were measured. There were many.  They were none of them commented on.  And there was bland evidence put before the Court in order to exonerate the Police position.
 We must remember that the weapon used in this killing was at the very lowest end of power of firearms.  It was a calibre .22 automatic pistol.  And we must consider this piece of evidence when we examine the next case where the goalposts were subtly changed and moved in favour of the State, again without any comment, adverse, from the State experts who were sitting in these hearings.
 In particular it was important that in the Kriel case a burn mark had been produced on the skin of Ashley Kriel with a weapon that had been discharged through two layers of clothing and this produced no adverse comment from anybody, any of the medical experts in this particular inquest.
 Before leaving the Kriel inquest I want to just mention that the post mortem refers to "circumferential abrasions involving both wrists of the deceased".  And there was little doubt that these were produced by the handcuffs and furthermore it was very unlikely, in my view, that the marks were produced after Ashley Kriel had been shot through the heart.  
 And so the position that we had was, that, and it should have been explored, as to how a man with handcuffs on both wrists could have put up such a ferocious fight and why in the fight the officer of the Police didn't throw away the firearm that he had firmly clutched in his hand to allow him to participate in the attempts to subdue Kriel more effectively.  I don't know.  Like the many people who slipped on soap, fell out of Police windows, all the other explanations, we are never going to know for sure.
 Lastly, we should see the harsh censure of the presiding officers in cases such as these being reserved for anybody who attempted to oppose the State juggernaut.  One should see the remarks made by the same presiding officer about the collusion between the Police to produce their sanitised sworn affidavits, line 28 in the judgment makes it quite clear that the Police have sat down to prepare the affidavits in this matter which were word-for-word copies of each other, and the best that the Court could do in that matter was to launch an earnest appeal for this never to happen again.  And that slap on the wrist must have really hurt the Police.   All of this without murmur from the professionals involved in the State side of the case.
 Let me turn now to another event which this Commission has already heard evidence about.  It was an event known as the Guguletu 7 shootings where 7 young men were shot at the Crossroads near Guguletu.  
 Briefly, the case arose as a result of certain counter-insurgency actions allegedly performed by the Police at the Crossroads in Guguletu.  The alleged results, if we are to go by the Police report, is that a sharp action was enjoined in which 7 alleged terrorists were killed.  Unfortunately Tony Weaver, from the Cape Times, did his own investigation and reported a somewhat different story which did the Police no credit.  His story was of the police executing, out of hand, alleged terrorists.  
 By the time that I entered the matter an informal inquest had already been completed and the findings of this informal inquest, before the same magistrate to whom I referred earlier, were exculpatory of the Police.  The State then launched a prosecution of Tony Weaver for publishing these vicious and untrue reports.  
 I was involved, with others, in the Weaver defence, and after a consideration of the Police statements, which were again of the sanitised version, it became quite clear that the analysis of the ballistic evidence on the bodies could not support the Police version.  Suffice it to say that in the Weaver trial the State called no experts whatsoever and Weaver was acquitted.  And the nett result of this was the ordering, by the Attorney General, of a second inquest, this time a formal inquest.
 It will be tedious to cover in detail the whole of the forensic evidence, and so I shall concentrate on two of the deceased and show how the Court dealt with this particular piece of evidence.  
 The first individual I shall refer to by the death register number of 700/86 was allegedly shot by the Police
at a distance of approximately six to seven metres.  That can be seen from the transcript of the Weaver trial on page 154.  The Court heard evidence that a four centimetre irregular bullet entrance wound was found on the right side of the head and a felt wad, I repeat that, a felt wad was recovered from the brain tissue.  A second wound of four centimetres diameter was noted at the angle of the jaw.
 I would like to hand up to the Commission photographs of the individual concerned and I would like to discuss it briefly.  And before continuing with this evidence, if I may, with your permission, I would like to say a little bit about shotgun ballistics.
 When a shotgun is discharged the variable number of lead pellets are blown out of the muzzle of the gun and together with these pellets a wad is blown out at the same time.  The wad in the cartridge keeps the pellets separate from the shot and allows for more efficient operation of the cartridge.  As the pellets exit from the muzzle of the weapon so they start to spread and that spread can be used to give an indication of the distance between the shooter and the target at the time of discharge.  The wad is ballisticly very inefficient and doesn't travel very far and loses energy very, very rapidly after it leaves the muzzle of the gun.  
 Now that's important because when you find a wad in the tissues, embedded in the brain, what that means is that it suggests that the shot is fired from close range.  When there's a lack of spread of the pellets from the same firearm it supports that contention that the shot is fired from close range, and above all if you look at the head of that deceased you will see that the jaw is virtually blown apart.  That supports a close range shot and the discoloration of the tissues supports a close range shot. All of this tends to indicate that this individual shot at close range by two shots from a shotgun. 
 Let us examine how the expert for the State deals with this piece of evidence.  Again an eminent member of the forensic profession in this town.  Firstly, he fails to discuss the wound number one, the jagged wound in the man's head and it is clear from the evidence that the police shot the man with the shotgun.  And in the evidence at the Weaver trial the Police make it quite clear that they fired the shots with the shotgun.  The only other policemen who could have fired a shot, which would have hit this man in the way that we see, was unable to explain the nature of the wound because he was armed with an R1 rifle and none of the wounds on this individual, in the face area, indicate that they were with an R1 rifle.  
 In the original affidavits before the first informal inquest the Police statements are strongly supportive of the position that the deceased was shot by a shotgun.  And now in the second inquest we have the State trying to discredit the evidence, which the family led, by trying to prove otherwise, despite the evidence.  
 The State expert goes on to justify his views and to justify the nonsensical report of the State pathologist which was inaccurate and sloppy to the point of ridicule, by saying, 
"I see a round wound at the bottom there which is very suggestive of an entrance wound, caused perhaps by a bullet.  And then the rest of the splintering of the face, of the jaw, may have been due to secondary missile fragments".
 With respect one needs a great deal more than the "eye of faith" to see what this expert was describing. I don't know whether this was ignorance, stupidity or dishonesty, and the State are stretching and were stretching at the time to fit in the evidence with what they wanted, and simply ignored any other evidence.
 It's also very interesting that if these individuals of these so-called State experts really did believe the things that they were saying, it's most illuminating that none of them came forward at the Weaver trial to say these things.
 The reason for them ignoring the first wound in this particular individual is very, very clear.  They wanted to avoid the inescapable conclusion that the shotgun was used at close range in contrast to the police evidence given at the first inquest and the Weaver trial.  And it was an example again, in my view, of the State experts attempting to bail out the Police when they were in trouble.  
 All of this was conducted with no comments from the Bench or Assessor about the pathetic nature of the post mortem reports and about the attempts made to confabulate the evidence that we have before us.
 Let us now look at deceased number 702.  He was a man that allegedly had been killed in the midst of this sharp action, where there were people running all over the place and shots were being fired.  It was a mini war.  
 The pathologist who described the post mortem described it as follows:
"A two centimetre glancing bullet entry wound was found at the back of the left buttock.  The track of this wound could be followed just under the skin to an exit wound seven centimetres above and medial, i.e. to the inside, of the one in the buttock, and an elongated burn mark was found along the back extending from this wound in an upwards direction".
 Why is that burn mark so important?  A firearm produces a burn mark on the skin when it is fired at very close range.  It is not the sort of thing that you find in a sharp action where people are running around and shots are being fired.  You don't snuggle up to your opponent in order to fire the shot which would have had to produce that result, particularly if your opponent is shooting back at you.  
 At the Weaver trial my evidence was quite clear, namely, that this was a close range, probably contact shot, from an R1 rifle which had produced the burn mark and the two wounds in the buttock and I differed only from the State pathologist in my view of which was the entrance wound.  My views were based on sound forensic evidence to be found in any forensic textbook.  
 The mark was described as a burn in the original report, it looked like a burn, and I hand in a photograph of that particular shot.  You will see it is photograph no.13.  And the mark looked exactly like the burn from a flash protector and the bullet traversing the skin would not produce such a mark but would produce a linear abrasion which was quite easily distinguishable from the mark that you have before you.
 The Assessor in this hearing, the second inquest, then chipped in to the inquest and suggested that as one bent over the hollow of the back would disappear.  Now the hollow of the back is very important because a bullet, which is what the State was suggesting, they were suggesting that a bullet had followed the contours of the back in order to produce the mark on the deceased.  But in fact if one understands that, the back is hollow and a bullet would not follow those contours, whereas a smoke burn would.  
 But not only that the Assessor then jumped into the fray to try and rescue the situation by saying that if the man had bent over it would have produced a flattening of that hollow and so the bullet could have done that.  But it is such a nonsensical proposition.  It has no merit other than to rescue the Police from an untenable situation that was developing.
 Let me turn now to the way in which the State expert handled the evidence.  The State expert in fact agreed with my findings and the other family experts that the entrance wound was the upper of the two wounds.  He did that initially.  But he goes on to say, and I quote from the record exactly:
"That is not my final opinion...."
said this expert,
"...I said it is possible to explain the appearance of this wound as having been caused by a very near firearm injury with smoke and explosive gases burning the skin.  That was our position.  But...."
says the expert,
"... one must consider the other possibility of a friction or brush burn from a high velocity bullet even at a greater distance and not necessarily a near wound, and this cannot be excluded".
 The expert goes on to say that that longitudinal wound had the appearance of a "peri-mortal parchment-like, dried-out wound", and that is why he believed that it was indeed a bullet traversing the skin.
 I want to show the Commission a photograph of what a peri-mortal bullet wound of the skin, skimming over the surface of the skin, looks like.  If one looks at the photographs that I give there those photographs of a deceased who was shot by the Police when they again went to arrest him.  There are a lot of bullet holes in him.  But one of the bullet holes you will see extending across his right thigh, and an enlargement of that bullet mark along the skin is seen on the bottom of the page.  With respect, learned Commissioners, you don't have to be an expert to see that there is no similarity whatsoever between the mark produced by that bullet over the skin and the mark on the back of the deceased in the Guguletu shooting.
 The expert in this particular case goes on to say, and here I refer to the goal post shift that I referred to before, and his answer to the following question which was put to him. The question is:
"In order to sustain burns as suggested by Dr Klatzow the deceased would have had to remove his clothes".
And the expert answers,
"Well, first of all the area in which the parallel lines are drawn in this photograph is the best example, to me, of what I talk about when I say that I see a parchment-like dried out abrasion.  I certainly do not see the two clear parallel lines.  And that portion of the upper portion of the wound looks to me typically like a peri-mortal abrasion which is dried out and parchment-like.  Obviously if we talk about flash burns I would agree that if there was a flash burn or a burn from a close wound and the person was clothed I cannot see how we could get that burn through the clothing unless of course it was totally contact wound so that the flame could get underneath the clothing".
Well of course that's exactly what I was saying.
 But the point that I wish to make is that this expert had been present at a previous trial where he saw no problem with a very much weaker weapon producing a similar effect.  So the goal posts were shifted and it became very difficult because those goal post shifts were always done with the weight of the authority of that particular expert behind them.
 It's quite clear that this State pathologist had trimmed his evidence to favour the State line and in so doing had had to virtually abandon his previous views.  And he even went so far as to say that he had never seen a burn like that and yet he offered up, without any experimental evidence, all sorts of explanations.  
 And again I say we have a senior State pathologist lending his stamp of authority to shore up this disgraceful performance that was masquerading as an impartial inquest.
 Now what is the relevance of all of this?  The relevance is that Tony Weaver described, and was prosecuted for describing the Police shooting unresisting men.  And what this evidence would have shown, had it been accepted, was that the Police had walked up to an individual lying on the ground, put the muzzle of a high-powered rifle onto the man's body and pulled the trigger.
 I just for completeness want to say this, and I want to read to you what the Magistrate says in his findings, and I will read in the vernacular.
"This last-mentioned wound in the buttock is, however, not fatal and the Court, including the learned Assessor, had before argument, when there was written argument by the legal representatives, requested that they indicate whether it was clear to them why, in the Weaver case, so much attention could have been given to this long black mark which has very little to do with the deceased's death, and whether this Court should, in any way, give any attention to that issue in the light of the fact that there was no eye witness or expert who can throw any light on that".
 I can only say this, the Magistrate did not pay attention to the evidence or we have an inference that the Magistrate was determined, together with the Assessor, to keep out any evidence which would have shown the Police in a poor light and which may have supported the family version.
 The fact that the wound did not kill the deceased was irrelevant.  It went to the heart of credibility as to how the Police had gone about this particular interaction.
 These are by no means the only cases which I could use to illustrate the extraordinary failure of the men and women in the employ of the State to give impartial and honest evidence under oath.  They may have acted stupidly, or ignorantly, or dishonestly, I don't know, but underlying all the failings there was a dark, evil and malignant thread which ran through all the evidence.  The State line was always favoured and punted to the derision and exclusion of all else.  
 I am aware that a head of the Forensic Science Laboratory in those dark days had issued an order that his staff were forbidden to assist me, to talk to me, to have any dealings whatsoever with me.  That information was relayed to me by several of his staff.
 During the case known as the Mandrax Factory case in Johannesburg I arrived home one evening to find the inspectors of the Medical Control Council from their head office in Pretoria who arrived on my doorstep and accused me of every contravention in the book relating to my licence to have Schedule 7 drugs in the course of my work.  Those charges were dropped by the Attorney General.  
 But it was no coincidence that a member of the Forensic Laboratory had spent time the previous week closely closeted with that head of the Medicine Control Council in Pretoria.  And one can only but see that that was an attempt to intimidate people who were in any way prepared to act against the State.
 It was also no coincidence that the Police were sent by the head of that infamous laboratory, as it was then in Pretoria, to harass me in terms of the Firearms act.   Those charges were swiftly dropped by the Attorney General with much anger expressed by the Attorney General incidentally.   I am pleased to say this, that in the road to recovery in South Africa that laboratory, since the departure of that odious individual, that laboratory has moved a long way on the road to self-healing and it provides a better service now than it ever did in the past.  
 There was, learned Commissioners, in my view, a conspiracy which was to be found in all the organs of State which acted in a concerted way to disable and discourage any attempts to investigate it in an impartial way, and to discredit those who failed to be discouraged.  This conspiracy was found in all walks of the Civil Service and could never have happened without the passive or active cooperation of the Bench, together with other branches of the Judicial Service.  This was most apparent in the Magistrates' Courts although there were instances in our Superior Courts which did not escape the apartheid ethos.   It was alleged for many years, and this Commission has heard untold evidence that torture was the standard method of police investigation.  It was never commented on by the forensic practitioners in this country.  And when your Commissioner Wendy Orr raised her lone voice the chorus of support which she got from her colleagues was deafening in its non-existence.
 When John Gluckman said the same thing later in the decade he was vilified.  He was insulted.  Not a word was raised by his colleagues who, incidentally, had sworn the same oath of fealty to their patients.  
 The Courts could have stopped all of this torture in its tracks if they had been a little more willing to cast the sceptical eye over the large numbers of confessions in serious cases, together with the constantly recurring theme of confession by torture.  I am shamed to tell you today it has not stopped, it still goes on.  Peter Jordie has uncovered evidence today, in the New South Africa, of torture by electric shock, the method which I refer to as the Eskom method.  You can get a confession out of anybody as long as you just connect them up to Eskom you will get a confession, I will get a confession out of you if I were to do that.  It's still going on.
 The professionals in this country owe the people of this country and owe the people of this country a duty of care and they failed singly to discharge this duty.  They shored up and gave succour to a system as monstrous as any in the dark annals of human crime.  
 Every time they failed to censure the excesses of the Police; every time they failed to see the growing evidence for torture; every time they allowed bland exculpatory decisions from the Bench to go un-commented on and uncensored they added another clause of tacit approval to the bullies charter which enabled the Police in this country to make that cap badge into the mark of Cain, into a badge of shame.
 We have, in the New South Africa, to guard against this ever happening again.  The allocation of power must be measured and carefully checked with the necessary counter-balances.  The Police, the Bench, together with all organs of State should be subjected to the minutest scrutiny.  And the freedom of speech, which is enshrined in our Constitution should be used to the fullest effect to prevent a repetition of our shameful past.  
 We must never again allow the powers that be to bring about the conditions in which the State organs could, with impunity, commit that vast squalid catalogue of crimes that came to characterise the apartheid regime.
 During that time I many times wanted to go to the Press with issues which troubled me, and every time I was persuaded to work through the courts.  I am saddened to say that this was a mistake.  Because my experience of the courts, particularly in courts involving political crimes, was this, that they were not courts of justice, they were courts of law, National Party Law. 
 Thank you for having listened to me.