Oscar Pistorius, the Olympic runner who faces sentencing for the 2013 murder of his girlfriend, removed his artificial legs and shuffled his way to the front of a courtroom in Pretoria, South Africa, on Wednesday.
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Judge Masipa adjourned the case on Wednesday after three days of testimony and arguments in Pistorius’ sentencing hearing.
Pistorius fired four shots at his girlfriend through a locked toilet door at his home in Pretoria in the early hours of February 14th, 2013.
Pastor Marius Nel said he had been in contact with schools that want the double-amputee Olympian to help disadvantaged children with sports training.
The sentencing proceedings had been expected to conclude on Friday, but Masipa announced she would only make the sentence public on July 6th. The pastor also said he had visited Pistorius after he was jailed for the earlier manslaughter conviction and found him to be a “broken” man.
Judge Thokozile Masipa on Wednesday granted a request by the State that a ban on the publication of crime scene photos of Reeva Steenkamp be lifted. Some exchanges between the defence lawyer and Mashabane drew murmurs and laughter from the gallery, prompting the judge, Masipa, to urge onlookers to restrain themselves.
Johannesburg-based criminal law attorney Zola Majavu said the judge could only deviate from handing out the minimum sentence if Pistorius had demonstrated exceptional circumstances to warrant such a deviation.
The athlete originally received a five-year sentence for a manslaughter conviction, that was upgraded to murder on appeal.
“He believed the person in the toilet was an intruder and (the) deceased was at the time in the bed”, Roux said.
He has always maintained that he mistook Steenkamp for an intruder when he fired four shots through a locked toilet door in his Pretoria home, killing her nearly instantly.
Roux said: “It was not the man winning gold medals that must be judged” but rather “a man standing on his stumps at 3 o’clock in the morning in the dark that must be judged”.
But Roux said there were “serious enemies” of Pistorius’ case and listed what he said were misconceptions that still existed about the shooting and the Supreme Court of Appeal’s decision previous year to change Pistorius’ conviction to murder.
“The accused was vulnerable because of his disability”, Roux pitched as he made his case for a non-custodial sentence that included community service for Pistorius. “That is what I think of all the time”.
Dressed in a T-shirt and athletic shorts, Mr. Pistorius, 29, is barely three and a half feet tall without the J-shaped carbon-fiber prosthetic legs that earned him the name the Blade Runner, an image far more humble than that of the world-class athlete who successfully challenged able-bodied athletes. “Pistorius had already paid heavily for killing Steenkamp”, Roux stressed.
“Nel also repeatedly criticised Pistorius for giving a television interview but not giving evidence at the hearing”.
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While speaking of the emotional impact of his daughter’s death he said had seen “only one photo” of Ms Steenkamp’s murdered body, the one that was produced in court when Mr Steenkamp was present two years ago, but that he wanted “the world to see” the others, as a warning to anyone thinking of using firearms.
