{"id":227878,"date":"2022-06-03T06:26:25","date_gmt":"2022-06-03T04:26:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/article\/middleburg-woman-must-get-r540000-from-the-minister-of-police-court-rules\/"},"modified":"2022-06-03T06:26:25","modified_gmt":"2022-06-03T04:26:25","slug":"middelburg-woman-must-get-r540000-from-the-minister-of-police-court-rules","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/middelburg-woman-must-get-r540000-from-the-minister-of-police-court-rules\/","title":{"rendered":"Middelburg woman must get R540,000 from the Minister of Police, court rules"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"article_body\">\n<p><a class=\"bigger-image\" href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/media\/uploads\/images\/photographers\/Ashraf%20Hendricks\/police-20210609-img_6917hr.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/middelburg-woman-must-get-r540000-from-the-minister-of-police-court-rules.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"caption\">A woman who was wrongfully arrested and detained has been awarded R540,000 in damages from the Minister of Police. Archive photo: Ashraf Hendricks<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Middelburg High Court Judge Mpopelele Langa has awarded a woman who was wrongfully arrested more than half a million rand in damages from the Minister of Police.<\/li>\n<li>Sales representative Juanita Wigg was arrested in public, handcuffed, taken to the police station and strip-searched in April 2019. She was released without charge.<\/li>\n<li>She sued for R1-million. Lawyers for the minister argued that she should get damages of only R20,000.<\/li>\n<li>But the judge said \u201cthe circumstances under which the arrest and detention took place call for stern censure\u201d and awarded her R540,000.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>A Middelburg sales representative has been awarded R540,000 in damages after she was wrongfully arrested, in full public view, and then detained for 40 minutes at the local police station during which she was \u201cstrip-searched\u201d.<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt class=\"leave\" height=\"1\" id=\"gu_counter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/middelburg-woman-must-get-r540000-from-the-minister-of-police-court-rules.gif\" width=\"1\"><\/p>\n<p>In a recent judgment in the Middelburg division of the Mpumalanga High Court, Judge Mpopelele Langa said there was no doubt that Juanita Wigg\u2019s dignity had been \u201cdesecrated\u201d by the events of 30 April 2019.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis type of unruly behaviour by the police should not be tolerated and must be discouraged at all costs,\u201d the judge said.<\/p>\n<p>Wigg was 29 and working as a sales representative on that morning when she went to a client\u2019s house to drop off a quotation.<\/p>\n<p>After she reversed out of the driveway, she was stopped by two police officers who, after looking through her phone and searching her handbag and car \u2014 apparently looking for drugs \u2014 handcuffed her and took her to the police station where a female officer ordered her to strip to her underwear and searched her.<\/p>\n<p>She was released without charge 40 minutes later.<\/p>\n<p>She sued the Minister of Police for unlawful arrest and detention.<\/p>\n<p>Lawyers for the minister initially opposed the matter, claiming the officers had seen her reversing out of the property of a known drug dealer and reasonably suspected that she had committed an offence. But later they conceded and the only issue to be determined by Judge Langa was what she should be paid.<\/p>\n<p>Wigg wanted R1-million. But lawyers for the minister argued that R20,000 would be \u201cfair compensation\u201d because she had only been detained for 40 minutes and had not been placed in a cell.<\/p>\n<p>In considering what Wigg should be paid, Judge Langa took into account her evidence that she was in tears throughout the incident and that she had testified that she felt completely vulnerable and embarrassed.<\/p>\n<p>The officers had \u201ctaunted her\u201d and at the police station they had said she must be searched by \u201cthe toughest one\u201d &#8211; apparently referring to a female police captain.<\/p>\n<p>The judge said there was no denying that the arrest had been done in full view of the public and had gravely embarrassed and humiliated her.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAlthough there is no evidence to conclude that the arrest and detention was malicious, I am, however, satisfied that the police officers were harsh in arresting her in the manner they did, including physically hurting her with the handcuffs.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI also doubt the necessity of the handcuffs given her petite stature and the fact that there is no evidence that she resisted arrest.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The judge said the police had not been \u201ccircumspect\u201d and had arrested her in a \u201cdramatic fashion\u201d in spite of her protests of innocence and her offer to follow them to the police station in her car.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMoreover, the manner in which they mocked her with their sneering remarks during the arrest and the fact that no apology was offered to her also aggravates the aggressive nature of the arrest and consequent violation of her rights.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Further, Judge Langa said, although the body search was done by a female officer, \u201cit nevertheless constituted an unwarranted and avoidable invasion of her right to dignity, privacy and bodily integrity which the court has to take into account in determining the compensation amount\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Judge Langa said Wigg was certainly entitled to more than the suggested \u201cmeagre\u201d R20,000 but compensation of R1-million, as claimed by her, was too high.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere is nevertheless no doubt in my mind that the circumstances under which the arrest and detention took place call for stern censure,\u201d he said, ordering the minister to pay her R540,000 and her legal costs.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div id=\"article_copyright\">\n<p>\u00a9 2022 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nd\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.<\/p>\n<p>We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, <b>not tracking<\/b> users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/middelburg-woman-must-get-r540000-from-the-minister-of-police-court-rules.jpg\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/\">Source: GroundUp<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A woman who was wrongfully arrested and detained has been awarded R540,000 in damages from the Minister of Police. Archive photo: Ashraf Hendricks Middelburg High Court Judge Mpopelele Langa has awarded a woman who was wrongfully arrested more than half a million rand in damages from the Minister of Police. Sales representative Juanita Wigg was [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":227879,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9928],"tags":[28001],"class_list":{"0":"post-227878","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-groundup","8":"tag-groundup","9":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/middelburg-woman-must-get-r540000-from-the-minister-of-police-court-rules.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227878\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/227879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}