South African state prosecutors on Tuesday began their appeal to have paralympian Oscar Pistorius’ conviction scaled up to murder from culpable homicide for killing his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp on Valentine’s Day 2013.
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The five Supreme Court judges could convict Pistorius of murder themselves, order a retrial or reject the prosecution’s appeal, legal experts have said.
However, on October 20, South Africa’s department of correctional services released him from jail and placed him under correctional supervision.
In giving her verdict past year, Masipa said that the state had failed to prove the case was “murder dolus eventualis”, a legal term for when the perpetrator foresees the possibility of his action causing death and persists regardless. “She didn’t make errors in regulation, she might or might not have dedicated factual errors”, Roux stated.
Today’s trial was televised and lasted for three hours with the judge’s appearing to agree with the prosecution that Pistorius knew that his actions, shooting into a small bathroom cubicle four times would result in fatal harm to the person behind the door.
“I believe they have a fairly good argument based on the facts of the case”, said Booth.
A key element is that Pistorius fired four bullets, not one. He carried her downstairs and she died shortly afterwards.
“The issue is not whether he knew the deceased was behind the door, but whether he knew someone was behind the door”. The prosecutor said Pistorius mounted several contradictory defenses in his trial, including his repeated insistence that he fired involuntarily, without forming any intent to act. “The fact that the defendant regrets his mistake, should only be incorporated in sentencing”, they quote German legal writings in their heads of argument.
The Supreme Court of Appeal has reserved judgment on the state’s bid to challenge the athlete’s culpable homicide conviction.
Brian Webber, another Pistorius lawyer, said he could not comment on the reported remark by Roux without hearing the recording or knowing the context in which the remark was allegedly said.
The State revealed shortly after the conviction that it would attempt to overturn the culpable homicide conviction at the Supreme Court of Appeal in Bloemfontein in a bid to charge the athlete with murder.
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Advocate Barry Roux then dealt with different pieces of circumstantial evidence which the State claimed were ignored by the trial court judge Masipa, saying the judge had given a very detailed judgement addressing the relevance of each one. The judges, however, interrupted him frequently: they were more interested in his interpretation of the concept of dolus eventualis, or indirect intention, which would form the crux of a potential murder charge. You don’t understand how she gets to where she does in that she basically accepts what the accused says: if he wanted to kill, he would have shot higher.
