Pretoria - A woman who stabbed her partner and father of her children once through the heart as she claimed she simply could no longer handle his abuse, must report to jail to serve her effective five-year sentence.
Dawida Solomons has been out on bail since November 2018 after a Northern Cape high court sentenced her to eight years’ direct imprisonment. The Supreme Court of Appeal said the sentence was definitely not too harsh. Her bail was pending the outcome of subsequent appeal proceedings.
On appeal, the high court suspended three of the eight years, which meant that Solomons had to serve a five-year term.
Still unhappy with the outcome, she turned to the Supreme Court of Appeal and argued that in light of the abuse and the fact that she had two children to look after, she should be given a non-custodial sentence.
Five judges of that court said that appeal involved an appropriate sentence in the context of reciprocal intimate partner violence and domestic violence, but they agreed that five years under the circumstances was fair.
Solomons said she and her partner Barnwell Sebenja, 34, were together for 15 stormy years. She, however, did not provide the court with any medical evidence of hospital treatments to support the allegations of assault by her partner.
The court criticised her for not laying charges of assault over the years.
Solomons was 47 when she murdered her partner.
She had stable employment working as a cleaner and a part-time assistant librarian at Carnarvon Kareeberg for several years.
She is the sole primary caregiver and breadwinner of her family. Her children with the deceased were 15 and 11 years old at the time of the murder.
Solomons said even though the partner was employed, he frequently asked her for money to buy alcohol, and she often yielded to his demands.
This was despite him also having another girlfriend. He would stay with Solomons for a few months, then leave to stay with his other partner for a few months.
The night before the incident in February 2016, Sebenja and Solomons went on a drinking spree right up to the following morning at a shebeen. Solomons said he again asked her for money, which she gave to him before she left to do some grocery shopping.
When she got home, with among others, a crate of cold meats, he grabbed a polony from the crate, and this angered her. A neighbour testified that an argument ensued, and according to him, Solomons used “harsh” and “foul language”.
The neighbour said Sebenja, whom he described as soft-spoken, demanded his backpack, clothes and work boots and threatened to leave Solomons for the other woman.
The neighbour left, but later came back to check on Sebenja. He found him standing at the doorway of the house. According to him, the next moment Solomons plunged a knife into her partner’s heart.
The dying Sebenja staggered backwards, and the neighbour caught him from behind. Solomons claimed that she had acted in self-defence.
She showed the court three facial injuries to her cheek, chin and forehead caused by stab wounds which she claimed were inflicted by Sebenja.
She testified that she was hospitalised on each of these occasions. Her evidence was that she did not lay charges against him because she was scared of him. She later obtained a family violence interdict against him.
Sebenja’s family meanwhile handed a letter to the court in which they disputed that he assaulted Solomons. According to them, Solomons was the aggressor.
A social worker told the court that Solomons came from an abusive and violent background; her father had often abused her mother.
Solomons said if the court sent her to jail, there was no one to look after her children as she was the primary caregiver. But the court noted that since the incident, one child had turned 18 and the other was 16.
Pretoria News