Deveney Nel’s killer will face another legal battle, as the mother of the 11-year-old victim, who accused Nel’s alleged murderer of rape, will take him to court to find out why the legal process ‘let him loose’, Cape {town} Etc reports.
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‘My daughter reported her rape and the violent assault she survived precisely because she wanted to protect other children from being attacked. But the system completely failed her … and we believe it failed Deveney Nel as well,’ the mother stated.
‘We need answers about how someone who subjected my daughter to a sustained violent rape attack and then dumped her, unconscious, into a lake where she could easily have drowned could have been found to lack criminal capacity,’ she added.
‘Worse still, even though psychiatric experts found that the accused rapist was at high risk of offending and resorting to violence, their recommendation that he should be subjected to a Children’s Court inquiry was never followed. And a year after the process against him was withdrawn, he allegedly stabbed Deveney to death.’
The mother decided to launch the review of the preliminary inquiry process against the alleged rapist, after her previous efforts of finding out what criminal offences he had been accused of against her daughter, were unsuccessful.
While she did seek a copy of the charge sheet in her daughter’s case against the alleged rapist, the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) has now told the mother’s lawyer that ‘no such charge sheet existed’.
‘The case did not proceed from the preliminary inquiry phase to the Criminal Justice Court. There is thus not a criminal charge sheet to supply, only preliminary inquiry records,’ said Manda Prins, head control prosecutor at the Albertinia Magistrate’s Court.
‘The National Prosecuting Authority is not the custodian of the preliminary inquiry records, but it resorts under the Department of Justice. It is my understanding that you should lodge an application in terms of the Promotion of Access to Information Act [PAIA] 2 of 2000,’ Prins added.
The mother had chosen to review the process since she had a ‘growing concern’ regarding the lawfulness of the preliminary inquiry process that allowed the alleged rapist to walk free, as reported by News24.
Furthermore, a PAIA request can ‘take several months to finalise’, and the review action requires that ‘all material and documentation that informed the NPA and the presiding magistrate’s decision-making’ in the case must be handed over to the alleged rape survivor’s mother.
The rape survivor’s mother had spent years trying and failing to get the prosecution services to ‘respond to her queries and meet with her’.
According to the mother of the victim, the only law enforcement official who tried to help her was the case’s investigating officer.
‘After this experience, I don’t believe that the legal system protects children who are victimised by other children at all,’ the mother said.
‘My daughter will live with what happened to her for the rest of her life, but her attacker was able to continue with his life like nothing happened. And I believe Deveney Nel paid the ultimate price for that,’ the mother added.
The rape case against Deveney’s accused killer has raised some questions about how it was handled.
The Valkenberg Hospital psychiatrist and clinical psychologist, who evaluated the teenager, concluded that the accused had ‘cognitive weakness and moral and social immaturity’.
Therefore, he found that the patient did not have criminal capacity at the time that the teen allegedly raped the 11-year-old victim in 2020.
However, the accused was at high risk of offending, resorting to violence and having ‘a disregard of societal rules and norms’, according to the psychiatrist and clinical psychologist.
The psychiatrist and clinical psychologist recommended that the alleged teen rapist should be referred to a Children’s Court inquiry process.
This would normally give the Western Cape Department of Social Development 90 days to investigate what should happen to him.
The department would also decide whether the accused posed ‘such a potential risk to himself and others’ that he should be treated in a secure facility.
The case was eventually withdrawn.
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Picture: Hoërskool Overberg / Facebook
