Swakop butcher wins parole bid

The Supreme Court has ordered that Thomas Florin – convicted in 1999 for butchering and cooking his wife in Swakopmund – can now be considered for parole.
In one of the most infamously gruesome murder cases in Namibia’s modern history, Florin killed his wife Monika in June 1998 at their Swakopmund home.
Florin cut up the body of his wife, stripped it of its flesh, cooked the remains and hid her bones in the ceiling of their house.
After two years of attempting to secure eligibility to be considered for parole, Florin and 25 others serving life imprisonment, turned to the Supreme Court for relief. On Friday, the court ruled that they may now be considered for parole.
The applicants had appealed an earlier High Court ruling denying them parole after completing ten years of their life sentences.
They had petitioned the court for an order declaring ten years the minimum sentence before being considered for parole and 20, being the maximum to be served in any given sentence of life imprisonment.
The Supreme Court found that the applicants could be divided into three groups, the first being sentenced prior to 15 August 1999 when the old Prisons Act of 1959 was repealed, the second, those that were sentenced after the new Act came into force and the third group, where the presiding judge had made a recommendation that they should not be considered for parole before serving a specified amount of time.
The eight respondents in the matter are the government, the Speaker of the National Assembly, the chairperson of the National Council, the safety and security minister, the commissioner-general of prisons, the head of the Windhoek Central Prison, the National Release Board and the chairperson of the Institutional Committee. The group of prisoners asserted that those who were sentenced prior to the new Act of 1998, were subject to a 1986 Cabinet directive in the then interim government of Namibia that stated that the minimum period of detention for life terms is 20 years and that a prisoner can be considered for parole when half of the minimum period had been served. The 1998 Act does not make any reference to prisoners serving life sentences.
The court found that “there was no provision for those offenders to become eligible for consideration for parole.
There was an absence of an empowering statutory provision to that effect.” The bench, comprising of judges Peter Shivute, Sylvester Mainga and Dave Smuts, in their ruling found that the appeal succeeds in part and set aside the High Court order.
“Save in the cases of a sentencing court recommending consideration of parole after the expiration of a period longer than ten years, the applicants sentenced during the time when the 1959 Act was still in force, may be recommended for parole after the completion of ten years. Where courts have recommended periods longer than ten years before the offender may be eligible for parole, such further periods would apply,” they said.
In the case of Thomas Florin, now 49, he is eligible for parole.
At his sentencing for the murder of his wife Monika, the presiding judge during the murder trial had recommended that Florin serve no less than 15 years before being considered for parole.
When Florin brought his High Court application for consideration for parole in November 2013, he had served almost 14 years of his life sentence. His application was denied at the time.
With the Supreme Court ruling, Florin is eligible for parole consideration, having served almost 16 years and the trial judge recommending at least 15 in December 1999.
The Supreme Court, in its ruling on Friday of last week, instructed the National Release Board to consider the group of lifers eligible for placement on parole within a reasonable time and within 90 days from the date of the order.


STAFF REPORTER