Joanna Moorhead’s interview with the barrister David Wolfe (My activist father was hanged, 13 August) makes moving reading, and provides valuable background to the TV documentary The Good Terrorist, to be shown on Channel 4 on 27 August. But Mr Wolfe gets several facts wrong, and ends with an extraordinary judgment.
I was a close friend of Mr Wolfe’s anti-apartheid activist father John Harris; was among those detained by the security police after the lethal bomb blast in Johannesburg station in July 1964; and was held in a cell very near to Harris’s for a month. After my release I attended every day of his trial; and after his conviction visited him regularly in prison until the morning before his execution. May I , from direct experience and records kept at the time, offer these comments?
Mr Wolfe claims that his father was hanged “for a crime against apartheid”. He was not. He was hanged for a crime against an elderly lady – murder – which he admitted, to which his counsel offered the defence that a mental disease had rendered him unable to distinguish between right and wrong.
This claim was rejected by the trial judge and by the subsequent court of appeal, and correctly so – it was, as all of Harris’s friends and family privately knew, a desperate fiction to save his life. David Wolfe ends by stating that his activist father – whose home-made bomb badly maimed 23 innocent civilians and killed one – had done “the right thing”. Was he misquoted by Joanna Moorhead? If not, I find this a shocking thing for an eminent British barrister with a special interest in human rights to say.
Maritz van den Berg
London
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