Sandra Smith was the last woman to be hanged in South Africa, executed alongside her boyfriend Yassiem Harris on the gallows of Pretoria Central Prison in June 1989.
The Crime
To make ends meet, Sandra Smith and Yassiem Harris tried renting video cassette recorders from rental shops and then selling them, but this scam did not net them any real money.
Harris, who was unemployed, also spent time hanging about outside a girls’ school and got to know several of the students, including 16-year-old Jermaine Abrahams.
He soon found out where she lived and, from his conversations with Jermaine, concluded that her family were quite wealthy.
They hatched a plan to break into the Abrahams family home to steal her mother’s jewellery and anything else of value.
Harris had also discovered that Jermaine’s parents left for work at 7:00 a.m. in the morning and that she left for school around 7:40 a.m.
Smith and Harris arrived at the house at approximately 7:30 a.m. on September the 1st, 1986.
Harris was let in by Jermaine on the pretext of wanting to use the telephone.
Once inside, they tied Jermaine up, but their robbery was abruptly disturbed by someone knocking loudly at the front door.
Jermaine started shouting for help and struggling against her bonds, whereupon they attempted to strangle her with a kitchen dishcloth.
Harris then fetched a knife from the kitchen and repeatedly stabbed Jermaine in the neck.
Amazingly, she did not die immediately from these injuries and managed to get to her feet and stagger a few paces before collapsing to the floor.
Harris carried Jermaine into her parents’ bedroom and forced her to reveal where the jewellery and family valuables were kept.
He wrapped the injured girl in a duvet and then cut her throat, leaving her to bleed to death on the bedroom floor.
Harris and Smith gathered up the stolen valuables and fled the scene.
Two weeks later, while Smith was being interrogated by police regarding the fraudulent video recorder rental scam, she surprised the interviewing detective by confessing to the killing of Jermaine.
“I wouldn’t have been able to live with it,” she said.
In her formal written statement, she told the police:
“He pulled the scarf tight across her mouth and then cut her throat.”
On the 15th of September 1986, Sandra Smith was formally charged with the murder.
Five days later, Yassiem Harris was arrested and similarly charged with capital murder.
The Trial at the Cape Town Supreme Court
At their committal hearing at the Mitchell’s Plain Magistrates’ Court on the 23rd of September 1986, both pleaded guilty to murder, alternatively to culpable homicide, and to stealing R2,000 worth of jewellery.
They were tried together at the Cape Town Supreme Court commencing on December the 1st, 1986, before Mr. Justice Munnik, the Judge-President of the Cape Court, sitting with two assessors.
South Africa did not employ the jury system—although its adversarial courtroom procedure was rooted in English criminal law—operating instead under a bench system of a presiding judge and two legally trained assessors.
Both defendants were represented by counsel and each attempted to shift the principal culpability onto the other.
Smith maintained that Harris had carried out the entirety of the physical violence, while Harris claimed to have been completely dominated and coerced by Smith, though both conceded they were present throughout the murder.
Harris testified:
“I began throttling her with a dishcloth but she still refused to talk. She wriggled for a few seconds, made some gurgling sounds, and then lay still.”
Jermaine passed out and when she revived, she was crying but still refused to talk.
“Sandra became furious asking Harris to stab her with a kitchen knife. I started stabbing Jermaine continuously in the neck. I saw blood coming out of her neck. I looked at Sandra and she was smiling. Jermaine was lying on the floor on her stomach and she wriggled on to her back, but I still went on stabbing her”.
Jermaine did not die from the stab wounds and managed to pull away from her assailants.
Harris carried her to her mother’s bedroom, forcing her to reveal the hiding place of the jewellery.
They wrapped her in a sheet, hoping she would succumb to blood loss.
However, once the jewellery was secured, Harris turned on Jermaine and slit her throat.
His courtroom justification was:
“I realised that she would not die from the stab wounds so I closed my eyes and slit her throat”.
According to Sandra Smith, Harris murdered the schoolgirl deliberately so she would not be able to identify them to the police.
Throughout the trial proceedings, Sandra Smith appeared deeply embarrassed by public revelations concerning her intimate sex life with Harris, seeming at times more distressed by these disclosures than by the fact that she was on trial for her life.
Verdict and Sentence
Having evaluated the testimony, Mr. Justice Munnik delivered a comprehensive, reasoned judgment in which he described Harris as:
“an appalling witness.”
The judge found it established beyond doubt that Harris had stabbed the girl and slit her throat to prevent identification.
He rejected Harris’s defence claim that he was dominated by Smith, an assertion refuted by the forensic psychiatrist called by the prosecution.
The court accepted that while Smith was demanding, she was not dominant, and found no evidence that she forced Harris to kill Jermaine, nor that she took any step to prevent the killing.
The judge concluded that both were equally responsible for the homicide under the legal doctrine of “common purpose.”
On the 11th of December 1986, Sandra Smith and Yassiem Harris were convicted of the murder of Jermaine Abrahams and of robbery with aggravating circumstances, and remanded for sentencing.
Eleven days later, on the 22nd of December 1986, they returned to court to receive the mandatory sentence of death: that they be hanged by the neck until dead.
In addition, Harris received a 10-year prison term for robbery, while Smith was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment for her part in the theft.
Sandra Smith became hysterical upon hearing the death sentence passed, screaming and struggling violently as she was restrained and taken down to the cells.
Death Row at Pretoria Central Prison: “The Pot”
Following sentence, both were transferred to the maximum-security death row section at Pretoria Central Prison, known colloquially among inmates as “the pot”.
This modern facility on the outskirts of Pretoria was the centralized execution site for all capital punishments in South Africa, utilizing methods described in execution methods.
Their automatic legal appeals were dismissed by the Appellate Division in Bloemfontein.
A formal review of the trial transcripts by the Ministry of Justice to determine whether to recommend executive clemency to the State President found no mitigating circumstances.
At this period in South African penal history, only about one in 50 individuals (approximately 2%) convicted of homicide were actually executed, with the overwhelming majority receiving prison terms or executive reprieves.
With clemency denied, their execution date was set for Friday, the 2nd of June 1989.
The Executions (02/06/1989)
At 6:50 a.m. on the morning of June 2nd, 1989, Sandra Smith was brought to meet Yassiem Harris for the first time in over two and a half years.
Together with two other condemned men—Michael Erasmus and Jacob Ndada, who had been convicted in unrelated murder cases—they were escorted up the 52 steps leading to the pre-execution holding room adjacent to the gallows chamber.
The formal death warrants were read to them, and they were granted an opportunity to speak their final words.
Their wrists were handcuffed behind their backs and white cotton hoods were placed over their heads, fitted with a front fabric flap that was left raised until the final moments.
The four prisoners were led into the large, brightly illuminated execution chamber.
The room measured approximately 40 feet in length with white-painted walls.
Spanning the ceiling was a heavy steel gallows beam fitted with seven large metal eyelets, from which four hemp nooses were suspended. (The massive gallows beam was designed to execute up to seven prisoners simultaneously).
Smith, Harris, Erasmus, and Ndada were positioned in line over the divide of the two-leaf trapdoors, standing upon painted footprints on the floor.
Warders held them steady while the executioner adjusted the ropes around their necks, setting the calculated drops under the evolution of the long drop in the 20th century.
The hangman pulled down the front hood flaps, ensured the nooses were correctly seated under their jaws, and pulled the release lever, dropping all four through the floor.
The bodies were left suspended for 15 minutes before being lowered into the examination room below.
After a medical officer certified death, the bodies were washed down with a hose over an integrated floor drainage gully.
A warder placed a lifting sling around each body to raise it with a mechanical pulley so the execution rope could be untied.
The corpses were lowered onto stretchers, placed into wooden coffins, and transported to a municipal cemetery for interment in unmarked graves.
Hangman Chris Barnard and Capital Statistics
Although executions in South Africa were conducted behind closed prison walls, the operational routine was documented in detail by South Africa’s resident hangman, Chris Barnard, in interviews prior to his death.
Barnard officiated at over 1,500 executions during his career at Pretoria Central Prison.
South Africa hanged 1,123 people at Pretoria Central Prison between 1980 and 1989 alone, with Solomon Ngobeni being the final person executed in the country on the 14th of November 1989.
The overwhelming majority of those executed during the 1980s were convicted of non-political, ordinary criminal murders.
According to records from the South African Department of Correctional Services, only two other Coloured women were hanged for murder between 1969 and 1989:
- Gertie Fourie: Hanged on the 20th of May 1969;
- Roos de Vos: Hanged on the 12th of December 1986.
Between 1959 and 1989, a total of 14 women were executed in South Africa out of an overall total of 2,949 judicial hangings.
Abolition of the Death Penalty in South Africa
Following the collapse of the apartheid regime, State President F. W. de Klerk declared a formal moratorium on executions in February 1990.
In 1995, the newly established Constitutional Court of South Africa delivered its landmark judgment in State v Makwanyane.
Interpreting Section 11 of the interim Constitution of South Africa—which established that:
“everyone has a right to life”
the Constitutional Court ruled unanimously that the death penalty constituted cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishment, declaring capital punishment unconstitutional for all civilian crimes.
This prohibition was permanently embedded in the final 1996 South African Constitution, cementing abolition across the country as documented in our study of the end of capital punishment in Europe and across the Commonwealth in capital punishment in the British Commonwealth.
Analytical Commentary
We cannot know why Smith and Harris went to the Abrahams home while they knew Jermaine would still be there, or whether they had formed any premeditated intention to murder her before entering.
Neither had any prior record of violent crime.
It is likely they panicked when someone knocked at the door and Jermaine shouted for assistance, attempting first to silence her.
However, it seems improbable that Harris believed the girl would not identify him to the police immediately after they left, given that she knew him personally, which likely motivated the decision to cut her throat.
It was additionally alleged that Smith desired Jermaine dead out of jealousy regarding her acquaintance with Harris.
Regardless of the motive, Jermaine Abrahams suffered a terrifying and violent death.
Nor can we know with certainty the exact division of physical violence during the struggle, or whether both took an equal physical part in the killing.
However, the legal doctrine of common purpose was clearly established: both entered the premises together to commit an armed felony, and neither made any effort to halt the murder or assist the victim.
With South Africa maintaining the highest rate of judicial executions in the world during the 1980s, the defendants would have been fully aware of the mandatory penalty for murder, illustrating a senseless robbery that ended in the destruction of three young lives.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Sandra Smith?
Sandra Smith was a 24-year-old South African woman who, alongside her boyfriend Yassiem Harris, was executed on June 2, 1989, for the robbery and murder of 16-year-old schoolgirl Jermaine Abrahams. She was the last woman hanged in South Africa.
Where were executions carried out in South Africa?
All judicial executions in South Africa during the 20th century were carried out in the maximum-security execution suite—known as “the pot”—at Pretoria Central Prison. The facility featured a gallows beam capable of hanging up to seven prisoners simultaneously.
What was the legal basis for convicting both Smith and Harris of murder?
Both defendants were convicted under the South African common-law doctrine of “common purpose.” Because both planned and executed the armed robbery together and neither attempted to intervene or stop the attack on Jermaine Abrahams, the trial court found them equally culpable for her death.
How many people were hanged in South Africa during the 1980s?
Between 1980 and 1989, South Africa executed 1,123 people at Pretoria Central Prison, representing one of the highest per-capita judicial execution rates in the world.
When was the death penalty abolished in South Africa?
Executions were halted by a presidential moratorium in February 1990. Capital punishment was formally declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court of South Africa on June 6, 1995, in the landmark ruling State v Makwanyane, on the grounds that it violated the constitutional right to life.
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