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'I'm glad to say justice works'
28/06/2007 14:13 - (SA)
Verashni Pillay
Cape Town - An exhausted but visibly relieved Norton family left the Cape High Court amidst cheering crowds on Thursday, following the sentencing of Dina Rodrigues to life imprisonment for the murder of Baby Jordan Leigh Norton.
The public gallery applauded loudly when Judge Basheer Waglay handed down a life sentence to Dina Rodrigues and two of her co-accused.
"You can rest now," sympathetic onlookers told Jordan's grandfather Vernon Norton. Bystanders stepped forward to shake his hand and pat him on the back as the family, along with Baby Jordan's nanny, made their way to a nearby restaurant.
He told the press outside that he was satisfied with the judgment. "I'm glad to say the justice system does work," he said to cheers from the crowd.
He said that after a long two years "hopefully we can lay Baby Jordan's memory to rest and maybe get some peace".
Despite calls to say "a word or two", Natasha Norton, mother of the murdered baby, chose to remain silent.
"You've got another daughter," bystanders assured Natasha, referring to the birth of her second daughter, Keira, in March 2007, with boyfriend Andrew Moolman. "It's your life," said another.
Meanwhile, Vernon Norton said his family would try to get "some perspective" and look into rebuilding their lives after the emotionally wrought past two years. "We'll try to get some sort of normality back into our lives," he said, and after a pause added: "I don't know if normal exists any more."
No emotion
Dina Rodrigues, wearing a lime green sweater, her dark hair loose, showed no sign of emotion until the very end of the sentencing.
The judge said in his run-up to handing down sentence that while Rodrigues was entitled to her constitutional right to silence, her lack of explanation of her motives had not been in her favour.
"Her silence will not be held against her," Waglay said, but pointed out that the court didn't have information on a number of things that would have helped to determine an appropriate sentence.
As it were, in the absence of mitigating factors and aggravating circumstances, Rodrigues received the maximum penalty for murder: life imprisonment.
Judge Waglay called the murder "barbaric", "horrendous" and "heinous" at various points in his sentencing. "For her it was like going to the supermarket and requesting an order for murder," he said of Rodrigues's drive to the taxi rank to hire her four co-accused.
Waglay pointed out that she had not only caused pain and claimed an innocent life, but "destroyed" the lives of her four co-accused.
Two of her co-accused, Sipho Mongezi Mfazwe and Mongezi Bobotyane also received life sentences. In addition they got ten years' jail each for armed robbery.
25 years in jail
A life sentence meant 25 years in jail with the possibility of parole only after the whole terms had been served.
The two other youths involved in the murder, Zanethemba Gwada and Bonginkosi Sigenu were each effectively sentenced to 15 years for the murder and the robbery combined.
Baby Jordan was killed in June 2005, when the four men entered the infant's home, posing as delivery men for a courier service.
Once inside, Bobotyane stabbed the baby in the neck, leaving her on a bed to bleed to death.
They had been hired for R10 000 by Rodrigues to kill the baby in an apparent love triangle involving the infant's father, schoolteacher Neil Wilson.
At the time, Wilson had broken off his intimate relationship with the baby's mother, Natasha, and was dating Rodrigues - apparently with a view to marriage.
- News24
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