Paralympian and Olympian Oscar Pistorius, who was imprisoned in 2014 for killing his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, is ready to be released from jail on Friday.
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Judge Thokozile Masipa said during sentencing that the state had failed to prove Pistorius’ intent to kill when he pulled the trigger.
Steenkamp’s parent’s June and Barry slammed the decision to release the man responsible for their daughter’s death after just 10 months, saying that serving less than one fifth of the sentence sends a bad message.
While there is speculation whether authorities will let him slip out of prison undetected, Logan Maistry, spokesman for the Department of Correctional Services, said Pistorius’ release would be without fanfare and by the book.
Prosecutors in the Oscar Pistorius case filed papers at South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal on Monday, looking to have his culpable homicide conviction upgraded to murder. He is now eligible for release in line with guidelines that allow “non-dangerous” prisoners to only spend a sixth of a custodial sentence behind bars. Mr Pistorius’s legal team has a month to file a formal response to the appeal.
Pistorius killed Steenkamp, who would have turned 32 this Wednesday, on Valentine’s Day in 2013 when he fired four shots into the locked door of a toilet cubicle at his home in Pretoria.
Pistorius is due to serve the rest of his term in “custodial supervision”, a form of house arrest.
John, a gardener on the same road as Pistorius’ uncle’s house, said: “He won’t exactly suffer, will he?”
His stay in prison will be brief, though, because of the overcrowded nature of South Africa’s prisons, CNN reports, adding that such an early release is hardly unusual in the country.
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Masipa, however, dismissed the State’s application to appeal Pistorius’s five-year-jail sentence. He made history in 2012 when he became the first amputee runner to compete in the Olympics.
