South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeals on Thursday found Oscar Pistorius guilty of murdering his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp in 2013, a move that overturns a former, less severe conviction of manslaughter.
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Pistorius, whose lower legs were amputated when he was a baby, denies deliberately killing Steenkamp, saying he mistook her for an intruder at his home.
In a packed courtroom with Reeva Steenkamp’s family listening to every word, the judge said that when Oscar Pistorius made a decision to fire four shots through a closed toilet door, he had gambled with a person’s life – whoever that was.
Leah, who claimed that the original judgement was “fundamentally flawed”, told the court in Bloemfontein that Pistorius “never offered an acceptable explanation” as to why he fired gunshots through the door, and that the death of the person in the cubicle was an obvious result of his shooting.
AP Pistorius reports for community service at the Garsfontein police station in Pretoria on November 14. “The matter is referred back to the trial court to consider an appropriate sentence”.
SYDNEY SESHIBEDI/REUTERS Pistorius occupied this cell in the Kgosi Mampuru II Correctional Centre before being released on parole.
“That was an error of judgment by the trial court…”
“A young man overcomes huge physical disabilities to reach Olympian heights as an athlete”, Leach said while delivering the ruling on behalf of the five-judge appeals court.
Reading the unanimous finding of the five-judge bench, Judge Leach described the case as a “human tragedy of Shakespearean proportions”. We put our faith in the justice system but now we can be assured that we’re going to get justice.
In South Africa, the distinction between a conviction of manslaughter and one of murder depends on whether the court rules that the suspect had intent to kill.
The appeal court ruling means he is unlikely to be there for much longer: the minimum sentence for murder is 15 years in prison, three times the term he received following his original conviction of culpable homicide, the South African equivalent of manslaughter.
Today, the judge, said: “A person should be committed of the crime he has convicted”.
“The issue of double jeopardy hasn’t really been robustly debated in this particular context since the advent of our constitution, and I do think there are grounds for debate on reappraising the current approach”, she said.
The case of Oscar Pistorius, the world-famous South African Olympic and Paralympic athlete, has been highly contentious since its beginning. “Romance blossoms and then ironically, on Valentine’s Day, all is destroyed when he takes her life”. He was placed under house arrest in October after serving one year in prison.
But Ms Steenkamp’s mother, June, was present and afterwards she was seen outside the court being embraced by members of the African National Congress Women’s League, who were singing songs of celebration.
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Before the Pistorius case, few in South Africa had ever heard of dolus eventualis, or indirect intention, the obscure legal concept around which the Pistorius case revolves.
