This week Supreme Court Judge Eric Leach said Judge Masipa had misinterpreted the concept of dolus eventualis and upgraded the conviction to one of murder.
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Ruling that a retrial is unnecessary, the Supreme Court of Appeal sent the case back to the trial court in South Africa’s capital Pretoria for sentencing.
Judge Thokozile Masipa, who originally found Pistorius guilty of South Africa’s equivalent of manslaughter, will re-sentence the Paralympic champion at a later date.
Pistorius is still out on parole, under house arrest at his uncle’s luxury home, and will not go back to prison until he has been resentenced – and that could happen anytime between now and the new year.
Oscar Pistorius has had his conviction of culpable homicide changed to murder for the killing of his girlfriend on Valentine’s day in 2013.
The court will hand down Pistorius’s new sentence in early 2016, and he will likely remain under house arrest until then.
Pistorius was initially convicted of culpable homicide. He’s also previously served one year of his original five-year prison sentence.
The defence argues that Oscar Pistorius has already served the period of imprisonment imposed by the trial court, so the conviction should stand.
A Pistorius family spokeswoman said in a brief statement: “the legal team will study the finding and we will be guided by them in terms of options going forward”.
“Justice Leach argued the fact that Pistorius didn’t know Steenkamp was behind the door did not mean he is not guilty of murder”.
Johann Engelbrecht, a criminal lawyer who is not involved in the Pistorius case, said it was doubtful that the former athlete s lawyers could challenge the murder conviction by appealing to the Constitutional Court. Pistorius denies deliberately killing Ms Steenkamp, saying he mistook her for an intruder at his home. During an interview with local television station ANN7, Reeva’s father Barry Steenkamp said, “It’s a big relief”.
That’s the chance Pistorius took when he fired hollow bullets created to fragment on impact from a 9mm pistol through the door of a “very small” toilet cubicle, Leach said.
“As a matter of common sense at that time the deadly shots were fired, the possibility of the departure of the individual supporting the door was certainly an apparent effect”.
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An athlete at the top of his game kills his woman and gets away with it. Strongly paralleling the 1994-1995 O.J. Simpson trial, Oscar Pistorius walked away with a similarly surprising verdict in 2014 and was nearly a ideal shadow of O.J.’s.
