Judgment No CCZ 8/16 7 Const. Application No CCZ 48/15 become so infirm and sick or so repentant about his or her past, that continuous incarceration of the offender at state expense constitutes a cruelty which can no longer be defended in the public interest. To insist, therefore, that regardless of the circumstances, an offender should always spend the rest of his natural life in incarceration is to express despair about his future and to legitimately induce within the mind and the soul of the offender also a feeling of such despair and helplessness. Such a culture of mutually sustaining despair appears to me to be inconsistent with the deeply humane values articulated in the preamble and the text of the Namibian Constitution which so eloquently portrays the vision of a caring and compassionate democracy …….. …….. It seems to me that the sentence of life imprisonment in Namibia can therefore not be constitutionally sustainable if it effectively amounts to an order throwing the prisoner into a cell for the rest of the prisoner’s natural life as if he was a ‘thing’ instead of a person without any continuing duty to respect his dignity.” In the South African case of State v Bull & Another 2002 (1) SA 535 (SCA) at 552 (para. 23), the court adopted a similar approach and noted that the possibility of parole saves a whole life sentence from being cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment. In a case emanating from Mauritius, de Boucherville v The State of Mauritius [2008] UKPC 37, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council dealt with an irreducible life sentence from a different perspective. Having noted that the legislative provisions for parole and remission did not apply to a prisoner in penal servitude, leaving him without hope of release for the rest of his life, the Committee held that the sentence imposed was so manifestly disproportionate and arbitrary as to contravene the right to a fair trial and procedural safeguards for prisoners. The Committee considered that a whole life sentence must allow for the prisoner to appreciate from the outset the possibility and timing of his sentence being reviewed.