Capital punishment in South Africa was abolished on 6 June 1995 by the ruling of the Constitutional Court in the case of S v Makwanyane, following a five-year and four-month moratorium that had been in effect since February 1990.
In part this was because of the jury system, completely dominated by White South Africans because an ongoing effort to suppress the franchise for non-white citizens.
At the same time, South Africa saw mounting international criticism against purposely political executions of anti-apartheid activists convicted of violent crimes; mainly blacks, but occasionally whites, the case of Frederick John Harris in 1965 being exemplary.
[7] The 1980s, a period of incremental constitutional change and lessening of some apartheid provisions, nevertheless saw a decline in even fundamental standards of rule of law and rapid increase in the number of executions; 164 in 1987 alone (an official tally higher than that of any other country, including the People's Republic of China and Iran).
[10] These numbers show, as a whole, the vast use of the "extenuating circumstances" rule in a country deeply steeped in racial strife, with widespread incidents of violence and presumed threat making such a defence justifiable.
One landmark case, concerning both race and juvenile executions, was that of Marlene Lehnberg in 1974, an Afrikaner woman sentenced to death for conspiring with Marthinus Choegoe, a Coloured minor, to kill her lover's wife.
The crux of the precedent, SA v. Lehnberg, refined was that an abundantly strong presumption for extenuating circumstances would prevail in cases involving a minor (Choegoe).
[25] In April 2020, former EFF Gauteng chairperson Mandisa Mashego announced that she supported the reinstatement of the death penalty in South Africa.