Du Toit, a senior counsel who was a member of the Johannesburg Bar, is reported to have committed suicide at his home in Johannesburg on Wednesday afternoon.

He is reported to have been shattered by news that his marriage was on the rocks.

He died after shooting himself in the heart.

He was 53 years old.

A top-class advocate, Du Toit was a well-known figure in Namibia's High Court, Supreme Court and lower courts, not just for his appearance in court in person, but also for an authoritative work on the Criminal Procedure Act, of which he was a co-author.

Du Toit and his co-authors' Commentary on the Criminal Procedure Act is as close to a Bible on that law as one can get, and is used on a daily basis by lawyers, Magistrates and Judges in Namibia to guide them through the frequent intricacies of the law on criminal procedure.

A highly effective counsel, who had the gift of cutting straight to the heart of an issue in question before a court, Du Toit was a regular visitor to Namibia.

He appeared in the country's courts in numerous high-profile cases.

Among these was High Court and Supreme Court litigation between 2001 and 2003 in which the constitutionality of the appointment of Magistrates by the Minister of Justice was attacked.

By winning that challenge, Du Toit helped contribute to the independence of Namibia's Magistrate's Courts by persuading the Supreme Court to find that the Justice Minister's power to appoint Magistrates, and the Justice Permanent Secretary's power to transfer Magistrates, were unconstitutional.

This ruling led to the transfer of these functions to a Magistrate's Commission, which was established in terms of new legislation that followed the Supreme Court's judgement.

In the field of criminal law one of Du Toit's headline-making cases was when he represented a group of Arab-speaking men who were caught in one of the largest diamond-dealing traps yet set by the Namibian Police, in March 2000.

He managed to save his clients from being sent to prison for their involvement in an illegal diamond deal involving gemstones valued at N$3,7 million, with each of his clients instead sentenced to a fine of N$80 000 and a suspended period of imprisonment.

Du Toit was also the counsel who conducted the defence of Okahandja district farmer Terrence Shepperson, who was tried on a charge of murder after he killed his wife in a shooting incident at his farm in the mid-1990s.

Once again, Du Toit helped to save his client from imprisonment.

Shepperson was convicted of culpable homicide instead of the more grave crime of murder.

Another of his prominent cases in Namibia was when he defended a Windhoek businessman, Marius Winterbach, in a High Court trial in which he was accused of having defrauded the Ministry of Health and Social Services of some N$2,4 million.

Du Toit won an acquittal for Winterbach in February 2000.

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