Law making DNA sampling mandatory a giant step in fighting crime

Last month, Johannes Nokeri – a serial rapist, who targeted unsuspecting women travelling from taverns late at
night and early in the morning during a five-year reign of terror that he visited on the Hammanskraal and Temba communities of the North West – was sentenced to 191 years in prison for a string of violent crimes.

In a recent interview with Pretoria Rekord, a woman identified only by the pseudonym Tumi, recounted the harrowing ordeal she had suffered at his hands after he had accosted her at gunpoint on her way home in August 2013.

It was five years before she saw him in the dock. And it was almost 10 years before he was convicted and finally sentenced for the crime on her. But in the end, justice was indeed served. And it was thanks largely to DNA.

Nokeri was linked to Tumi’s case and several others via DNA after he was arrested in 2017, on separate charges of raping two women and stealing their friend’s car (for which he is currently also serving a 10-year sentence). A DNA sample was taken from him.

But, up until now at least, DNA sampling of people who have been arrested, or even of convicted criminals, has been more or less discretional.

This means that in the countless cases where the discretion to take DNA from people already in the authorities’ hands for crimes already committed, perpetrators have in all likelihood been slipping through the cracks.

Section 36(D)(1) of the Criminal Law (Forensic Procedures) Amendment Act (or the DNA Act) – which finally came into effect this week, eight long years after it was first signed into law – now makes mandatory DNA sampling of people arrested for a wide variety of crimes – ranging from robbery to serious assault, to offences under the Firearms Control and Explosives Acts, to murder to rape.

And it’s something to be welcomed as a massive step forward in the fight against crime, especially violent crime.

It has the potential to help put violent criminals in jail – and to keep them there – and make the country a safer place.

It also offers hope to victims of an untold number of unsolved crimes. Victims like Tumi and Nokeri’s other victims may now, too, one day see justice.

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It is a very realistic hope, because we know that, in South Africa, crime in its various forms has become a way of life and that habitual offending is rife.

While it’s difficult – if not impossible – to find any definitive statistics on recidivism in this country, the National Institute for Crime Prevention and the Reintegration of Offenders’ (Nicro) Betzi Pierce in 2020 told Mail & Guardian it could be as high as 87%.

An article in The Harvard Review last year quoted statistics from the United States, known to have one of the highest recidivism rates in the world, of prisoners rearrested within five years of release standing at a much lower 76.6%.

Jes Foord – who was gang-raped in front of her father while having walked their dogs in 2008 – has founded the Jes Foord Foundation to assist survivors. She appeared at the public hearings held before the DNA Act was signed into law.

Her presentation provided important insights into the trauma not just of rape, but of making a statement and having bodily samples taken afterwards, but it stressed how important the evidence-taking process is for seeking justice not to come to naught.