IMAGINE this, you are looking after your twin brother’s house while he is away for the weekend. Your seven-year-old son and your girlfriend are staying with you.
As evening approaches, you head out to go and buy a few groceries. As you pull out of the driveway you are surrounded by 10 armed men who wrench you out of your vehicle, lay you face down on the ground and hold you at gunpoint. You don’t know who they are or why they are there. You are terrified as you think about your vulnerable girlfriend and son and wonder what will happen next.
Unfortunately, this scenario may not be as unbelievable as we would like. We all know of someone who has been hijacked, however, this wasn’t a hijacking. The armed men were the police.
They were in plain clothes in unmarked cars and they were there to arrest Wayne, but instead they arrested Shane, his twin brother. Despite Shane’s girlfriend producing his ID book, driver’s licence and work access card, the cops refused to believe that he was not Wayne.
Shane was dragged into his brother’s kitchen, his hands cuffed behind his back and assaulted with a police torch. There he stood, handcuffed, bleeding profusely, being slapped around and verbally abused while his son clung, terrified, to his leg. He urged the policemen to take his son into a different room, which they ignored. Although this took place in 2011, the young boy still bears deep emotional scars.
That night the police searched the house and, despite the fact that they found nothing, they took Shane off to jail. He did not know what he was charged with and yet he spent 29 days in prison. For 29 days, he was robbed of his liberty by the very officials who are meant to protect it. On his third court appearance, he was released. It seems baffling that with so many criminals wandering our streets, an innocent man was wrongfully imprisoned and it took 29 days for him to walk those very streets again.
Shane has sued the minister of police and, while liability has been conceded, the amount of compensation is still to be determined. He is claiming in excess of R4 million in damages. I believe that he is entitled to as much as he can get for what he endured.
After all, let’s not forget that we have the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, and not the other way around.
