When the Gavel Trembles: The Day Judge Ratha Revealed More Than the Courtroom Could Bear”

It began like any other morning in Courtroom 4B — fluorescent lights humming, wooden benches creaking, and the dull echo of lives suspended in legal limbo. But beneath the procedural surface, something electric crackled. Everyone felt it. They just didn’t know the storm was about to break.

Advocate Mnisi stood with a stiffness that didn’t belong to a man but to a pillar just before it fractures. His voice did not tremble — not yet — but it carried the weight of someone whose nights had been carved open by fear. He spoke plainly: he was not safe. Not inside the courtroom, not outside the courthouse, not on the walk to his car, not in the hours that stitched his days together.

One might expect a plea like that — simple, human, essential — to land softly in the heart of justice.
Instead, it thudded against stone.

Before he could inhale again, Judge Ratha dismissed the notion that “everyone should be at ease” because security was “heightened” in the courtroom. It was a clinical answer to a bleeding wound.

Mnisi pressed:
What about when he leaves?
What about the killers who wait in unlit corners?
What about the poisoned dog of Advocate Ngomezulu, or Babu Absalam Zumu sleeping in a garage to stay alive?

The air thickened. The walls listened. The court tried not to blink.

But then — like a needle dragging off a vinyl record — something shifted.

Because when threats were made toward figures like Gininda and Maha, suddenly security surged beyond mere protocol: “heightened above heightened,” as if danger only counts when it rings the right doorbell.

Yet, astonishingly, in the very place designed to protect truth, Judge Ratha stepped into the spotlight with a monologue that felt torn from a surrealist play rather than a court transcript.

He joked — joked — about where an assassin should shoot him.
Not the face, he pleaded theatrically, because he wished to remain handsome in his coffin.
Not the head, because of his “good looks.”
He said it with levity, as if death were a costume one chooses for a final performance.

The room froze.
Justice itself seemed to recoil.

It was a moment that hung between the absurd and the obscene — a judge crafting metaphors of murder while a man before him begged simply to survive long enough to defend himself.

And still, the proceedings marched forward.

Mnisi tried again, voice thinning at the edges:
“I’m mentally not fit… psychologically affected.”

He wasn’t embellishing. Anyone could see the fracture lines, the way his sentences carried something heavy and invisible. But Judge Ratha countered with icy efficiency.

If Mnisi wanted a psychologist, he could go.
But the trial would continue.
With him or without him.

As though fear could be removed like an overcoat.

The tension reached a boiling point when Mnisi said aloud the words no one in that room was prepared to hear:
“The court is forcing me…”

Ratha snapped:
“Who is forcing you? I am NOT forcing you.”

And at that moment — before the exchange could detonate — an unexpected figure saved the courtroom from implosion.

The interpreter.
Brand new.
Unshaken.
A voice sharp as flint cutting through a fuse.

Her interruption severed the moment, and the showdown everyone sensed was coming dissolved like smoke. For a beat, justice stood on one trembling leg, the balance restored by a woman whose job wasn’t to stop a metaphorical fire, but did so anyway.

But the reprieve was temporary.

When the judge turned back to Mnisi and declared, “I can see you are a man,” the words landed like an insult disguised as praise. What did masculinity have to do with mental health? Survival? Fear?

November is a month dedicated globally to men’s mental health — and yet, here stood a judge equating strength with silence, resilience with obedience, gender with stoicism.

It was not judgment.
It was misjudgment — broadcast live.

Then came the final twist — the one no screenwriter would dare include for fear of being called dramatic.

Ratha began telling a story about his wife.
About alleged threats to his life.
And again, he repeated the request:

“If anyone wants to kill me, please don’t shoot me in the face.”

He spoke of the mafia, of gangsters in Chicago, as though comparing himself to fictional legends absolved him of the surreal insensitivity unraveling in real time.

He wanted — even in hypothetical death — to look good for his wife.

It was macabre comedy.
A grotesque lullaby.
A judge standing atop a courtroom trembling not from danger, but from disbelief.

When he finally adjourned the court for the day, it felt less like a closing gavel and more like the slow exhale after surviving a near collision — with madness, arrogance, or both.

Yet the tragedy of the day was not the judge’s theatrics, nor his bizarre flirtation with death as metaphor.

It was the quiet truth left behind:

Advocate Mnisi’s fear remained unacknowledged, his mental health dismissed, his vulnerability brushed aside as collateral inconvenience.
He was told — indirectly but unmistakably — that justice could replace him. That the machinery of the court moved with or without the humans inside it. That the gavel must fall even if a man does.

It was not just a failure of empathy.
It was a failure of the sacred duty of the bench.

Because justice is not blind —
it sees through the eyes of those entrusted to protect it.
And on this day, justice saw a man who laughed at death while ignoring the living.

The twist no one expected was not spoken aloud, but silently understood:

Sometimes the danger isn’t outside the courtroom.
Sometimes it’s sitting on the bench.

This trial was never only about the murder of Senzo Meyiwa — though it should have been.
It became a portrait of how systems break quietly:
through dismissal, through arrogance, through a judge who turned trauma into theatre.

And the final image the day left behind?

Mnisi standing alone, emotionally unshielded, psychologically weathered, holding onto a dignity the court refused to protect — like a man standing on the steps of justice while the wind tries to take his coat.

The gavel fell.
But something far heavier remained suspended in the air.