A tale of two prisoners: Juane Jacobs and Jacob Zuma
Juane Jacobs is a prisoner at Leeuwkop in Johannesburg. He is extremely ill but he has been denied medical parole. Are double standards being used to determine who gets medical parole in South African correctional facilities?
Contains dramatised scenes.
<p>The NPA asked GroundUp to print the following response (which was subsequently updated a second time):</p>
<p>In relation to the article by GroundUp the NPA accepts that it is correct that any prisoner who suffers from a terminal disease might qualify for medical parole in terms of Section 79(1)(a) – (c) of the Correctional Services Act 111 of 1998. There is however a further requirement that the risk of re-offending must be low.</p>
<p>The NPA further accepts that the medical parole board acts according to prescribed powers and will only release those prisoners who qualify and not release those who do not. The NPA is however concerned that Mr Jacob’s family are wrongly and publicly issuing statements that Jacobs without question qualifies for medical parole, when this is still a matter for the medical parole board to decide according to strict criteria, including possibly the prisoner’s danger to society and this is causing the Schoombie family unnecessary and unfair anguish.</p>
Next: Unemployed and desperate: Over 100 people sleep outside labour office
Previous: 700 shacks demolished by Makhado municipality using an interim court order
© 2021 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.