Guilty verdict in Gobabis murder

A GOBABIS resident whose girlfriend was found stabbed to death in her home in September 2005 was convicted on a charge of murder in the High Court in Windhoek this week.

For Gerson Uri-Khob (44), a failure to testify in his own defence in the face of evidence implicating him in the deadly stabbing of his live-in girlfriend, Justine Doëses (33), on September 7 2005, proved to have been an expensive risk, it turned out when Acting Judge John Manyarara found him guilty of murder on Wednesday.
At the start of his trial before Acting Judge Manyarara on November 24 last year, Uri-Khob pleaded not guilty to a count of murder. His defence lawyer, Etuna Josua, told the court that Uri-Khob would not be giving a plea explanation at that stage of the trial, but that the details of his defence would be emerging in the course of the trial.
As it turned out, Uri-Khob never entered the witness box to testify in person on the allegations that were made against him.
This fact had serious consequences for him.
In his judgement, Acting Judge Manyarara mentioned that in this case the prosecution’s evidence on the killing may have been circumstantial, as there were no other eyewitnesses to the stabbing. However, Uri-Khob’s failure to give evidence in the face of the State’s evidence which had gone unchallenged, and the ease with which he would have been able to meet the prosecution’s case if he were innocent, strengthened the State’s case, the Judge said.
Uri-Khob’s failure to testify left nothing to gainsay the State’s case, he added, concluding that the only inference that could be drawn from the evidence before the court was that Uri-Khob had murdered Doëses, with an actual intent to kill.
During the trial a Police Constable, Julius Leswape, told Acting Judge Manyarara that he was on duty at the Gobabis Police Station when Uri-Khob entered the charge office at about 22h30 on September 7 2005 and reported to him – crying as he did so – that he had stabbed his wife with a knife because she had been sleeping with another man. Uri-Khob was also carrying a bloodstained knife – one blade of a pair of shears – which he put down on a counter in the office.
Because Leswape was going off duty at that time, he handed Uri-Khob over to a colleague and left.
An occurrence book kept at the charge office showed that Uri-Khob was booked into a cell for drunkenness and again released at about 03h00 the next morning.
Later that morning, after another Policeman, Sergeant Esegiel Tjibanga, had reported for duty, he found Uri-Khob at the Police station’s cells. Uri-Khob told him, too, that he had stabbed his wife, adding that he did not know how seriously she had been injured.
Only by about 10h00, after Uri-Khob had told Tjibanga that he wanted to go home to check on his wife, did Police officers visit his home to look for Doëses.
She was found lying dead in the house.
A doctor who performed a post-mortem examination on her, Samir Kumar Basu, told the court that she had a single stab wound to the left side of her chest. The wound penetrated into her left lung, claiming her life.
An indication of Uri-Khob’s version of events came during the doctor’s cross-examination by Josua, when the lawyer said Uri-Khob’s instructions were that Doëses had been stabbed accidentally when she ran into the knife.
Because the stab wound was on the left side of her back, he did not know how she could have run into the knife, Dr Basu replied to that.
Addressing the court yesterday on the sentence that is to be imposed on Uri-Khob, Deputy Prosecutor General Orben Sibeya suggested that a jail term of 35 years would be appropriate. He commented that the stabbing had been perpetrated “in cold blood”, “in a barbaric manner” and on a defenceless woman, and argued that the fact that it took place in a domestic setting should be regarded as aggravating.
Uri-Khob also did not testify in mitigation in preparation for his sentencing.
Josua, telling the court that Uri-Khob was a father of three children who had been a farmworker at the time of the stabbing, said Uri-Khob had been in an intimate relationship with Doëses for 12 years. Her death had left him heartbroken, Josua said.
He asked the court to extend mercy to Uri-Khob, and suggested that a sentence half as long as that suggested by Sibeya, with part of it also suspended, would be a balanced one.
Acting Judge Manyarara said he would indicate on Monday when he would be ready to hand down the sentence. Uri-Khob remains in custody, where he has been kept since June last year.
– werner@namibian.com.na