- Jason Rohde reached the end of the road in his attempts at being cleared for the murder of his wife, Susan.
- The Constitutional Court dismissed his application for leave to appeal, saying there was no chance of success.
- He is already in prison, serving a reduced sentence of 15 years.
Convicted murderer Jason Rohde reached the end of the road in his attempts at clearing his name over the murder of his wife, Susan.
This was after the Constitutional Court dismissed his application for leave to appeal.
The court sent out a terse notice, saying he had no reasonable chance of success.
"The Constitutional Court has considered this application for leave to appeal," read the order, date stamped 17 December.
"It has concluded that the application should be refused, as it bears no reasonable prospects of success.
"Order: Leave to appeal is refused."
Rohde went to prison on 20 November already to start serving his 15-year sentence after his attempts at staying under house arrest until the highest court's decision was known, failed.
The Western Cape High Court's Judge Gayaat Salie-Hlophe found him guilty of murdering his wife during a fraught night at the Spier wine farm in Stellenbosch during a realtors' conference in 2016.
The judge found he had murdered her, and staged a suicide.
The couple's marriage hit the rocks when Susan found a card in Jason's bag, giving away his relationship with fellow estate agent Jolene Alterskye.
They tried reconciling, and Susan had hoped to put up a united front in front of others at the conference, where Jason was regarded as a senior and influential figure in the property industry.
However, things fell apart when it became clear that Jason still had feelings for Alterskye, and after a night of arguing, he eventually lay down on the bed.
Jason said he had a short sleep to be ready for the conference programme a few hours away, but when he woke up, the bathroom door was locked.
Eventually a maintenance worker at the hotel opened the door, and Susan was found dead on the bathroom floor, with the cord of a styling iron around her neck.
He insisted that she killed herself.
However, after a lengthy trial, which featured painfully long examinations and discussion of her injuries from an image of her naked body on a mortuary slab, and the circumstances of the last months of their marriage, Salie-Hlophe concluded he killed her.
Rohde, however, felt that Salie-Hlophe had been biased towards him, and launched a series of appeals, which Salie-Hlophe rebuffed. Some of the things he objected to was her ordering that he be fetched from where he was receiving medical treatment when he did not arrive for one of his court appearances.
At one point, his lawyers said Rohde might even try to have a new trial.
At the Supreme Court of Appeal level, he had his sentence reduced from 20 years to 15 years, but the court still agreed that he had murdered his wife.
Before he went to jail, he said he was looking after his children and his mother, and that they relied on him for emotional support.