This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
A newly created constitutional court, deciding its first major case, choosing to strike down a punishment most of the country's population still supported, is not the safe opening move an institution worried about its own legitimacy would ordinarily choose. That is exactly the position South Africa's Constitutional Court was in when S v Makwanyane and Another reached it in 1994, automatically referred under the interim Constitution rather than chosen by the Court itself, and it is worth being clear about just how little cover the justices had for the decision they reached.
Opinion polling at the time showed most South Africans favored retaining capital punishment, in a country only recently emerged from decades of political violence in which the death penalty had itself been used, controversially, against opponents of apartheid. There was no clear textual command in the interim Constitution's Bill of Rights that unambiguously outlawed it; the Court had to construct that conclusion from the rights to life and to freedom from cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment, provisions that other constitutional courts, interpreting similar language, have read in both directions. And the Court had almost no institutional track record of its own to draw on: this was its first year of operation, deciding a case that would define, for decades, how much independence from majority sentiment South African constitutional review actually had.
The justices ruled against the death penalty unanimously, eleven to nil, and did so with eleven separate opinions rather than a single consolidated text, a choice that let each justice articulate their own route to the same result, from Court President Arthur Chaskalson's principal judgment through the ubuntu-grounded reasoning of Mokgoro, Sachs, Mahomed and Langa. South Africa has not reinstated capital punishment since. For a court to spend its very first major judgment establishing that it would enforce the Bill of Rights against both a preceding statute and a documented majority preference is the kind of founding act constitutional scholars point to when asked what actually makes a young court's later independence credible: not a promise, but a demonstrated willingness, on day one, to rule the harder way.