Motata case postponed

By Karyn Maughan and Gill Gifford

Pretoria High Court Judge Nkola Motata believes he will be acquitted of drunk driving - without ever having to utter a word in his own defence.

And the judge will not be calling a single witness to disprove the charges that he drunkenly crashed his Jaguar into the garden wall of Hurlingham home owner Richard Baird - who recorded the judge's alleged drunken rantings on his cellphone.

Minutes after Johannesburg magistrate Desmond Nair dismissed Motata's application for the case to be thrown out of court on grounds that there was no evidence against him, Motata's lawyers closed their defence case.

One year and 10 months after the trial began, magistrate Nair found that he could not "come to the conclusion that, at this stage - there's no evidence upon which a reasonable person could convict".

Dressed in a pin-striped suit, pale blue shirt and matching tie, Motata remained impassive during Nair's ruling, although before the decision he had appeared upbeat, and laughed and joked with his lawyers.

Nair on Thursday recognised that there were significant problems with the State's evidence in regard to Motata's blood alcohol analysis, which led him to drop an alternative charge against Motata of driving with an excessive amount of alcohol in his blood. But he found that the audio recordings of Motata's alleged drunken rantings and the judge's handwritten, misspelt and inaccurate list of particulars constituted enough evidence to make a case against him.

Despite this, Motata's counsel advocate Bantubonke Tokota SC told the court his client would not be testifying or calling any other witnesses in his own defence.

This means that the evidence led by the State - which revealed how Motata had sworn profusely, insulted police officers, reeked of alcohol and had to be prised out from behind the steering wheel - will go uncontested.

He is standing by his earlier submissions that he had not been drunk when he crashed into Hurlingham homeowner Richard Baird's wall, and further denied that he had driven recklessly and then failed to co-operate with police officers on the scene, or resisted arrest.

In his argument for the dismissal of the case against Motata, Tokota attacked Baird's character, slamming him as a racist liar who had selectively recorded his client on the night of the accident so as to paint the worst possible picture of him.

State advocate Zaais Van Zyl SC stressed that the State had managed to prove that alcohol had been found in the judge's blood: "the blood sample contained alcohol, a fact relevant to the main charge," he said.

Magistrate Nair postponed the case to July 16, when both sides will deliver their closing arguments.

• This article was originally published on page 2 of The Star on June 26, 2009