LONDON, United Kingdom. South African prosecutors told an appellate court on Tuesday that Oscar Pistorius, the Olympic runner who was found guilty of culpable homicide in the killing of his girlfriend, should have been convicted of the more serious crime of murder.
They argued that the trial judge who acquitted Mr. Pistorius of murder last year erred when she accepted his argument that he had thought he was aiming at an intruder when he fired four shots through a locked bathroom door at his Pretoria home in February 2013. The shots killed his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, 29, a law school graduate and budding reality-television star.
The offense for which Mr. Pistorius was convicted in September 2014 — culpable homicide, roughly equivalent to manslaughter — was not the correct one, the prosecutors argued before the Supreme Court of Appeal in Bloemfontein.
Mr. Pistorius’s early release from prison last month infuriated Ms. Steenkamp’s family, as well as women’s rights groups, which argue that he deserved a harsher sentence. He is to spend the remainder of his sentence, about four years, under house arrest and “correctional supervision,” and he is staying in the home of his uncle Arnold Pistorius, a wealthy businessman.
The trial riveted South Africa and raised issues of class, celebrity, violence against women and race in a country that is still grappling with its sense of identity two decades after the fall of apartheid. It also offered two starkly competing narratives of one of the world’s most famous disabled athletes, a double-amputee who has competed at the Olympic Games as well as the Paralympics.
The defense depicted Mr. Pistorius, 28, as a caring boyfriend who, feeling vulnerable because he was not wearing his prosthetic legs at the time, fired his gun to protect himself and Ms. Steenkamp. Prosecutors sought to present him as a brash and jealous man with a love of guns who killed Ms. Steenkamp in a violent rage after an argument, and who then concocted a cover-up.
Presenting its case before five judges on Tuesday, the prosecution argued that the trial judge, Thokozile Matilda Masipa, had wrongly applied the legal principle of dolus eventualis — the notion that a person should be held accountable for the consequences of their actions if they are foreseeable. Mr. Pistorius shot to kill when he fired into the bathroom, the prosecutors said, even if he believed, as the defense argued, that Ms. Steenkamp was in the bedroom.
“The court should have rejected his evidence as impossible, if the court took into account the circumstantial evidence,” the chief prosecutor, Gerrie Nel, told the court. “The court should’ve rejected his evidence because he was a poor witness.”
He added: “On the objective facts, the accused cannot escape a conviction of murder.”
The defense, which also presented arguments on Tuesday, reiterated its stance that Mr. Pistorius had feared for his life when he fired the shots that killed Ms. Steenkamp.
The appellate court could overturn Mr. Pistorius’s previous conviction, or order a new trial. At least one of the appellate judges indicated that a retrial was not the preferred option. If convicted of murder, Mr. Pistorius could face 15 years behind bars.
Mr. Pistorius was not present at the hearing, which was televised.
June Steenkamp, Ms. Steenkamp’s mother, sat stoically in the courthouse. In an interview with Sky News on Tuesday, she called for Mr. Pistorius to face a tougher punishment.
“He killed her, and he’s been in jail for 11 months, and it’s too short a time for taking someone’s life,” she said. “Even though I don’t want to hurt him in any way, he has to face the truth.”
Credit: New York Times
