Several important critical perspectives on media coverage of the Pistorius trial emerge in comparison to the most famous murder trial in South Africa in the first half of the twentieth century. In both cases, a well-known sports star shoots a young woman under circumstances that cause speculation and conjecture. The trials led to huge public interest and crowded courtrooms. While there are many points of comparison between the cases, in this article we do not discuss what the comparison reveals about the legal intricacies of the Pistorius case, or on the current state of the subjudice laws, or on the effect of the live broadcast (matters to which we plan to return), but rather on the different ways in which the legal protagonists and media framed the accused and other major figures in the two cases. We find that in the earlier trial the media, after the trial, played the role of criticizing the ways in which the jury and the judge had understood the events, while in the Pistorius trial the media overwhelmingly followed a framing narrative produced by the police and the prosecution, neglecting their watchdog function. There has been a public interest taken in this trial quite unprecedented in the annals of South Africa. (Judge President of the Transvaal, Justice De Waal 1935) JAMS_8.3_Phelps_361-378.indd 361 11/29/16 3:34 PM Kelly Phelps | Ian Glenn 362 Journal of African Media Studies FRAMING COETZEE AND PISTORIUS ‘Framing’ is a key concept in contemporary media analysis and deals with the ways in which media consciously or unconsciously include or omit elements from their reporting and resort to explanatory schemas that resonate with audiences (Scheufele 1999; Scheufele and Tewksbury 2007). As Scheufele and Tewksbury point out, framing differs in crucial aspects from older notions of agenda-setting and priming, and the colloquial connotation gives it added cogency in examining trials. In both of these cases, of course, the media may be both following and resisting the agendas set by the prosecution, defence and judges. In our analysis we show how differently events transpired in the two trials. INTRODUCTION – THE COETZEE MURDER TRIAL Before examining the differences between media reactions systematically, a brief account of the earlier trial is necessary given that there is no thorough account in print. (Benjamin Bennett’s account in Too Late for Tears [1948] is no longer readily available and raises few of what seem to us to be the most salient issues, while Coetzee’s own later confession was in Afrikaans and in a very limited edition [Coetzee and De Winter 1954].) What should be stressed, however, is that this was the most sensational and widely followed murder trial of its epoch and probably of the twentieth century as the Judge President’s remark above suggests. In our account of what follows we draw freely on the press coverage of the Star, the Rand Daily Mail, the Sunday Times and the Burger, as well as on the trial transcripts (Rex v Jacobus Hendrik Coetzee, 1935). On 1 February 1935, the body of a young white woman was found next to the railway line near the 16th mile post on the Pretoria–Pietersburg main road. One of the first detectives on the scene was Jacobus Hendrik (Koos) Coetzee, a Detective Sergeant in the Railway Police. Early newspaper reports called for help in identifying her and there was a response to the Rand Daily Mail call. That Sunday, 7 February, the Sunday Times, clearly with good links to the police, said that they knew the murder was almost certainly related to the fact that the woman was heavily pregnant (and had in fact gone into labour as she was dying, with the baby dying). While some might have seen this as a tragic suicide, the police by this time knew better. A farmer from the farm Leeuwkoppies, some 3 km from the Northam Railway Station in the Rustenburg District, Mr Van den Bergh, had come forward to identify the young woman as Gertruida Opperman, who had lived with his family to help his invalid wife cope with a young family. She had gone, a few days before she would have the baby, to Pretoria to confront the man she had said was the father of the child with his responsibilities. A letter Van den Bergh had received from Opperman written from the waiting room in Pretoria station where she had spent much of the Sunday, 31 January, waiting for the man revealed the shocking news: the man for whom she was waiting was none other than Coetzee, one of the first policemen on the scene of the crime. Early news reports identified Coetzee as a rugby international but he was in fact a well-known provincial player for Transvaal, who came close to selection for the 1933 Springbok matches against the touring Wallabies. At the time, he was engaged to the daughter of Colonel Cilliers, the head of the Railway Police, and living on the property of his future in-laws. Within weeks, an enquiry before a magistrate determined that Coetzee should stand trial for the murder of Opperman, and the case was heard in JAMS_8.3_Phelps_361-378.indd 362 11/29/16 3:34 PM The trials of the centuries www.intellectbooks.com 363 May 1935 before the Judge President, Justice de Waal. The Attorney General of the Transvaal prosecuted, and Mr De Villiers appeared for Coetzee. Much could be said about both the preliminary inquest and the trial and the efficiency of the criminal justice system. Some 100 witnesses passed through the courts in the nine days the trial took, ranging from tracking to ballistics to handwriting experts, in addition to Coetzee himself. This is in stark contrast to the Pistorius trial, which took 49 days to hear from 41 witnesses over seven months. There were also Grand Guignol moments to rival anything in the Pistorius trial – notably when the doctor brought the skull of Opperman to court in a biscuit tin to show evidence of the passage of the bullet. What transpired was shocking: all the evidence showed Coetzee had left a dinner party where he had taken his fiancée to meet friends, driven his fatherin-law’s car to the station, picked up Opperman, taken her to this isolated spot, assaulted her (there were signs of a furious struggle), then shot her and, it appears, tried to leave her body on the railway tracks to be dismembered, but she crawled away to die next to the tracks. While Benjamin Bennett’s account in Too Late for Tears focuses on Coetzee’s completely implausible attempt to provide an alibi, we wish to focus on other issues: the narrative invoked by Coetzee’s defence; the gender politics of the judgement; the legal status of the death penalty on a murder conviction that changed as the trial neared its conclusion; and the media reaction to the judgement and sentence. Coetzee’s defence involved a complicated two-step approach. On the one hand, he had to deny meeting a woman whom he had planned to meet, according to a letter he had sent, and to whom he had sent a messenger to tell her he would see her later; on the other he had to say that he had no reason to see himself as the guilty father. To do the latter, he relied on circumstantial evidence. By Van den Bergh’s own evidence, Coetzee had come to visit the family at the farm in July 1934 and secretly stayed the night in Opperman’s room until Van den Bergh, after getting up at night, saw that Coetzee’s motorcycle had not left the property, and discovered them in Opperman’s bedroom by breaking through the window. As Opperman was nearing the end of her pregnancy in February 1935, it seemed she was already pregnant when Coetzee had slept with her in July 1934. The defence raised the suspicion that the real father was Van den Bergh. De Villiers’ cross-examination of Van den Bergh focused on how often he got up at night. When he questioned the largely invalid wife he asked her pointedly whether Van den Bergh had started getting up more at night during the past fifteen months (the period that Opperman had lodged with the family). The inference appeared to be that, if Coetzee was not the father of the child, why would he have any need to kill Opperman? As the circumstantial evidence against Coetzee was so heavy, this line of questioning, even if it did not put Coetzee out of the picture, deliberately or not offered some kind of rationale for the murder: it seems that Opperman was, in effect, trying to blackmail Coetzee to get him to take financial and perhaps even marital responsibility for a child that was not his. This defence narrative clearly resonated with the court. Opperman had given Van den Bergh a letter testifying to his good conduct towards her – a letter Van den Bergh said he requested given that a young single pregnant woman leaving his employ might cause scandal – but even this letter was regarded suspiciously by the Judge President. By the end of the trial, the Attorney General had to warn the JAMS_8.3_Phelps_361-378.indd 363 11/29/16 3:34 PM Kelly Phelps | Ian Glenn 364 Journal of African Media Studies jurors that, even if they thought that Coetzee had been unjustly accused of paternity, the murder must be their focus. What does one make of this narrative, reading the court documents and news reports of the time? The letter that Opperman wrote to Van den Bergh from Pretoria station hours before her murder is strangely familiar, opening ‘Outjie’, a friendly diminutive and scarcely a term for a distant employer, and ending, ‘Jou Verlangende’, or Longing for you, or She who longs for you, with two x marks. Moreover, she had addressed the letter to herself but told Van den Bergh to open it, which also suggests a kind of secrecy about their relationship. On the other hand, Van den Bergh himself handed the letter over to the police without being forced to, and it may well be that he was not the father. Coetzee had met Opperman briefly in May; Opperman may well have had sexual relationships with another man. The jury, as the prosecution had reminded them, were there to judge a murder trial, not a paternity suit, and they duly fo

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世纪的审判：谋杀和南非的媒体

与 20 世纪上半叶南非最著名的谋杀案审判相比，媒体对皮斯托瑞斯审判的报道出现了几个重要的批评观点。在这两种情况下，一位知名体育明星在引起猜测和猜想的情况下射杀了一名年轻女子。审判引起了巨大的公众兴趣和拥挤的法庭。虽然案件之间有很多比较点，但在本文中，我们不讨论比较揭示的关于皮斯托利斯案的法律复杂性，或者关于屈从法的现状，或者关于直播的效果（我们计划返回的问题），而是法律主角和媒体在两起案件中对被告和其他主要人物进行诬陷的不同方式。我们发现，在较早的审判中，媒体，在审判结束后，扮演了批评陪审团和法官对事件的理解方式的角色，而在皮斯托瑞斯的审判中，媒体压倒性地遵循了警方和检方制作的框架叙事，忽视了他们的监督职能。在南非的历史上，这项审判引起了公众的兴趣，这是前所未有的。（德兰士瓦法官，德瓦尔法官，1935 年） JAMS_8.3_Phelps_361-378.indd 361 11/29/16 下午 3:34 Kelly Phelps | Ian Glenn 362 非洲媒体研究杂志 框架库切和皮斯托瑞斯 “框架”是当代媒体分析中的一个关键概念，它处理媒体有意识或无意识地在其报道中包含或省略元素的方式，并诉诸于与观众产生共鸣的解释性模式（舍费尔 1999 年；Scheufele 和 Tewksbury 2007）。正如 Scheufele 和 Tewksbury 指出的那样，框架在关键方面与议程设置和启动的旧概念不同，口语内涵使其在审查试验时更具说服力。当然，在这两种情况下，媒体可能都在追随和抵制检方、辩方和法官设定的议程。在我们的分析中，我们展示了两个试验中发生的不同事件。引言——库切谋杀案审判 在系统地检查媒体反应之间的差异之前，鉴于没有完整的印刷记录，有必要简要介绍早期的审判。（Benjamin Bennett 在《Too Late for Tears》[1948] 中的叙述不再容易获得，并且几乎没有提出我们认为最突出的问题，而库切自己后来的供词是在南非荷兰语中以非常有限的版本 [Coetzee and De Winter 1954]。）然而，应该强调的是，这是其时代乃至可能是 20 世纪最轰动和广泛关注的谋杀案审判。世纪，正如上述法官主席的评论所暗示的那样。在我们接下来的叙述中，我们自由地引用了《星报》、《兰德每日邮报》、《星期日泰晤士报》和《汉堡》的新闻报道，以及审判记录（Rex 诉 Jacobus Hendrik Coetzee，1935 年）。1935 年 2 月 1 日，在比勒陀利亚-彼得斯堡主干道 16 英里哨所附近的铁路线旁发现了一名年轻白人妇女的尸体。最早出现在现场的侦探之一是铁路警察的侦探警长 Jacobus Hendrik (Koos) Coetzee。早期的报纸报道要求帮助确定她的身份，兰德每日邮报的电话得到了回应。那个星期天，2 月 7 日，星期日泰晤士报，显然与警方有良好的联系，说他们知道这起谋杀案几乎肯定与这名妇女怀孕的事实有关（实际上她在临终时已经分娩，随着婴儿死亡）。虽然有些人可能认为这是一起悲惨的自杀事件，但此时警方已经知道得更多了。距离勒斯滕堡区诺瑟姆火车站约 3 公里的 Leeuwkoppies 农场的一位农民 Van den Bergh 先生站出来说，这名年轻女子是 Gertruida Opperman，她与家人住在一起，帮助他生病的妻子应对一个年轻的家庭。在她生孩子的前几天，她已经离开了，到比勒陀利亚去面对她所说的孩子的父亲和他的责任。范登伯格从比勒陀利亚车站的候车室收到一封来自奥珀曼的信，她在那里度过了 1 月 31 日星期日的大部分时间，等待那个男人的消息透露了令人震惊的消息：她正在等待的那个人正是库切，第一批到达犯罪现场的警察之一。早期的新闻报道称库切是一名橄榄球国脚，但他实际上是德兰士瓦著名的省级球员，他差点入选 1933 年跳羚队与巡回赛小袋鼠队的比赛。当时，他与铁路警察局局长西利尔斯上校的女儿订婚，住在他未来姻亲的财产上。几周内，地方法官的一项调查决定库切应该因谋杀奥珀曼而受审，此案在 JAMS_8.3_Phelps_361-378.indd 362 11/29/16 3:34 PM 审理了几个世纪的审判 www.intellectbooks.com 363 1935 年 5 月在法官总统德瓦尔大法官面前。德兰士瓦总检察长起诉，德维利尔斯先生为库切出庭。关于初步调查和审判以及刑事司法系统的效率，可以说很多。除了库切本人之外，还有大约 100 名证人在审判所用的 9 天内通过了法庭，从追踪到弹道学再到笔迹专家。这与皮斯托瑞斯的审判形成了鲜明对比，后者在七个月的时间里花了 49 天的时间听取了 41 名证人的意见。在皮斯托瑞斯的审判中，也有大吉尼奥尔时刻可以与任何事物相媲美——特别是当医生将奥普曼的头骨放在饼干罐中带到法庭以显示子弹通过的证据时。发生的事情令人震惊：所有的证据都表明库切离开了一个晚宴，他带着未婚妻去见朋友，开着岳父的车去车站，接走了奥珀曼，把她带到这个偏僻的地方，袭击了她（那里是激烈斗争的迹象），然后开枪打死她，似乎试图将她的尸体留在铁轨上进行肢解，但她爬到铁轨旁边死去。虽然本杰明·贝内特在《泪流满面》中的描述集中在库切提供不在场证明的完全不可信的尝试上，但我们希望关注其他问题：库切的辩护所引用的叙述；判决的性别政治；随着审判接近尾声，对谋杀罪判处死刑的法律地位发生了变化；以及媒体对判决和判决的反应。库切的辩护涉及复杂的两步方法。一方面，根据他寄出的一封信，他不得不拒绝会见一个他计划会见的女人，并且他已经派信使告诉她以后会见到她；另一方面，他不得不说他没有理由认为自己是有罪的父亲。为了实现后者，他依赖于间接证据。根据范登伯格自己的证据，库切于1934年7月来农场探望家人，并在奥普曼的房间里秘密过夜，直到范登伯格晚上起床后，看到库切的摩托车没有离开庄园，并通过打破窗户在奥珀曼的卧室里发现了它们。1935 年 2 月，奥珀曼的怀孕即将结束，而库切在 1934 年 7 月与她上床时，她似乎已经怀孕了。辩方怀疑真正的父亲是范登伯格。De Villiers 对 Van den Bergh 的盘问集中在他晚上起床的频率上。当他质问这位身体虚弱的妻子时，他尖锐地问她，在过去的 15 个月里（奥珀曼与家人住在一起的那段时间），范登伯格是否开始更早起床。推论似乎是，如果库切不是孩子的父亲，他为什么需要杀死奥普曼？由于针对库切的间接证据如此沉重，这一系列的质疑，即使没有把库切排除在外，有意或无意地为谋杀提供了某种理由：似乎奥珀曼实际上是在试图勒索库切，让他为一个不属于他的孩子承担经济甚至婚姻责任。这种辩护叙述显然引起了法庭的共鸣。奥珀曼给范登伯格写了一封信，证明他对她的行为很好——范登伯格说他要求写一封信，因为一名年轻的单身孕妇离职可能会引起丑闻——但即使是这封信也被法官主席怀疑。在审判结束时，司法部长不得不警告 JAMS_8.3_Phelps_361-378.indd 363 11/29/16 3:34 PM Kelly Phelps | Ian Glenn 364 Journal of Africa Media Studies 陪审员认为，即使他们认为 Coetzee 被不公正地指控为父亲，谋杀必须是他们的重点。阅读当时的法庭文件和新闻报道，人们对这种叙述有何看法？奥珀曼在她被谋杀前几个小时从比勒陀利亚车站写给范登伯格的信奇怪地熟悉，开头是“Outjie”，一个友好的小词，几乎不是一个遥远的雇主的术语，结尾是“Jou Verlangende”，或渴望你，或渴望你的她，有两个 x 标记。此外，她把这封信寄给了自己，但让范登伯格打开它，这也暗示了他们对关系的一种保密。另一方面，范登伯格本人在没有被迫的情况下将这封信交给了警方，很可能他不是父亲。库切在 5 月曾短暂地见过奥珀曼。奥普曼很可能与另一个男人发生过性关系。陪审团，