Former South African Cops Sentenced for Dragging Man Behind Police Van and Beating Him to Death
Eight ex-policemen who dragged a Mozambican cab driver behind a police van and then beat him to death inside a jail cell were each sentenced to 15 years in prison, reports the New York Times.
Mido Macia was a 27-year-old migrant worker who drove a cab in Daveyton, a township about 25 miles east of Johannesburg, using the money to support his family back in Mozambique—his parents, two nephews, and his girlfriend, Biuda Mazive, with whom he had a child. On February 26, 2013, he was confronted by police for parking illegally and disrupting traffic. The situation quickly went completely to hell.
Video recorded by a witness and posted on Facebook by South Africa’s Daily Sun newspaper showed police officers chaining the man to the open back of a police van that came to the scene later and, over the loud objections of a horrified crowd, driving off, dragging the man along the road.
That video is embedded below. It’s dizzying and upsetting, and appears to show Macia struggling with police before being overpowered. He is then shown chained to the back of the van, face up, as the van pulls off, slowly at first, and then at something like normal driving speed.
He was reportedly dragged in this way for a third of a mile. At the police station, Macia was reportedly put in a holding cell, whereupon the officers jumped him and beat him until he succumbed to accumulated blunt force injuries.
The judge in the case, Bert Bam, declined to sentence the eight men to the maximum 25-years, citing their lack of prior criminal records and an apparent lack of premeditation.
At the sentencing hearing on Wednesday, at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria, he called the murder “barbaric and totally inexplicable,” adding, “What made their conduct more reprehensible was their cowardly attack in the cell on a defenseless and already seriously injured man.”
Macia’s family has reportedly sued the South African government. Government officials “have said they intend to settle the case.”
