Niël Terblanché
Jandre Dippenaar’s legal team and the state prosecutor are set to present arguments for mitigation and aggravation of sentencing before Magistrate Gaynor Paulton at the Swakopmund Regional Court when the pre-sentencing portion of the murder trial continues on Thursday.
This comes after two witnesses testified on behalf of Dippenaar’s character in mitigation of sentencing Wednesday.
In June, Magistrate Paulton convicted Dippenaar on six counts of murder, one count of reckless and negligent driving, and one count of driving a vehicle without a valid driver’s license in a trial that continued for almost ten years.
The guilty verdict stems from a horrific motor vehicle accident on 29 December 2014, near Henties Bay, in which six people lost their lives.
Three of the deceased persons, Dinah Pretorius, Charlene Schoombee, and JC Horn, were close friends of the convicted person, and the remaining three, Walter Helmut Joschko, Stephanie Dorothea Schemick Joschko, and Alexandra Marlene Joschko, were members of a family from Germany who, at the time of the incident, were on a self-drive tour through Namibia.
Antonia Joschko was the only other person who survived the head-on collision between the Ford Ranger her father was driving and the FJ Cruiser that the convicted person was driving at the time.
On Tuesday, the state called Joschko and JC Horn’s father to the witness stand to testify in aggravation of sentencing.
Jan Horn, during his testimony, stated that he would never be able to forgive Dippenaar because his son burned to death after the two vehicles caught fire after the crash.
Horn stated that he spent the last ten years looking for justice and closure to this horrific chapter in the lives of him and his family.
Joschko, who was only 16 when she lost her entire family, testified that the aftermath of the tragedy caused her severe mental and physical pain.
Dippenaar, while pleading for sentence mitigation on Tuesday, again sincerely apologized to Joschko and the families of the deceased.
He informed the court that he had been living with severe remorse for the past decade.
When the trial resumed yesterday, Frans Grobler, a close friend of the convicted person, and psychologist Willem Annandale testified about his character in mitigation of sentencing.
Annandale submitted a report that revealed the results of an analysis of Dippenaar’s state of mind.
The analysis was conducted while Dippenaar was incarcerated in police custody in Walvis Bay after his bail was revoked following his conviction in June.
In his report, Annandale found that the convicted person is truly remorseful and that he has a daily struggle with getting to grips with the dreadful consequences of what had transpired almost ten years ago.
After the state and the convicted person’s defence counsel presented their arguments in mitigation and aggravation today, it is expected that Magistrate Paulton will deliver Dippenaar’s sentence on Friday.
