The Eastern Cape High Court (Makhanda) has set aside an East London man’s 2017 child rape and sexual assault conviction as well as his 12-year jail sentence following a series of technical blunders in the East London Regional Court.

The accused, Siphiwo Manga, was, in 2017 convicted of raping and sexually assaulting a child at the East London police barracks. He was sentenced to an effective 12-year jail term, reports the Daily Dispatch.

But, in the course of preparing the record for Manga’s petition to the Judge President against both his conviction and sentence, it was found that the transcript of the evidence was almost non-existent.

The reasons for the woefully incomplete transcript could not be explained to the High Court hearing Manga’s petition.

Attempts to augment the scanty record by relying on the magistrate and prosecutor’s notes also came to naught.

Judge Thembekile Malusi, with judge Justin Laing agreeing, found the magistrate’s contemporaneous notes made at the trial were so inadequate that they contributed little.

To make matters worse, the prosecutor had claimed to have lost his trial notes and said he could find no trace of the accused’s defence attorney.

Between a prosecutor who had lost his notes, a vanishing defence attorney and a magistrate whose notes were found to be too ‘terse’ and ‘cursory’ to contribute much, Malusi said the court had no choice but to set aside the conviction and sentence.

Malusi said a record was not required to be a ‘perfect’ record of the trial. 

But he said where it was clear from the record that ‘so much material evidence is missing to render impossible a fair assessment of the record’, then the proceedings had to be set aside, notes the Daily Dispatch.

Malusi emphasised he was setting aside the conviction and sentence due to ‘technical’ irregularities and that the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions had a discretion to start afresh with a new trial against Manga in front of a different magistrate.

Full Daily Dispatch report