Former Supreme Court and High Court judge president Pio Teek has died at the age of 74 in a local hospital.
Teek who has been in the news for the past decade and a half for all the wrong reasons was the first black Namibian to be appointed to the Namibian judiciary.
He served as a judge of the High Court since 1992 and was appointed to the Supreme Court as a judge of appeal in 2003.
He took early retirement at the age of 58 in October 2005 after being suspended following his arrest on rape charges in January 2005.
He stood trial in the High Court in 2006 on eight charges, including two counts of rape, two charges of abduction, alternatively kidnapping, and two counts of committing an indecent act with a child under the age of 16.
The State appealed against his acquittal, and three South African acting appeal judges of the Supreme Court overturned the trial judge’s decision in April 2009 and directed that Teek should continue to stand trial on six of the eight charges he had been facing.
When his trial resumed in the High Court near the end of 2009, Teek opted not to testify in his own defence, and was again found not guilty by the trial judge.
That was still not the end of the matter, as the State again appealed to the Supreme Court, where the appeal was eventually heard in October 2018 and dismissed two months later.
Following his acquittal on the rape charges, he unsuccessfully sued for damages in several lawsuits against the minister of justice, the Ombudsman and several other government agencies.