Pretoria - Criminal trials ought to be finalised without undue delay. It is thus in the interest of justice that Oscar Pistorius now appears before the high court in Pretoria to face his sentence for murder.
This is according to the State in opposing Pistorius’s application to the Constitutional Court for leave to appeal against the findings of the Supreme Court of Appeal in Bloemfontein.
Read: State challenges Oscar’s appeal
The State on Monday filed its opposing papers to Pistorius’s Constitutional Court bid and said he has no prospects of succeeding.
A nail-biting time lies ahead for Pistorius while he awaits the decision by the Constitutional Court whether it would grant him leave to appeal against his murder conviction. It is not known when this court will come to a decision.
Pistorius is pinning his hopes on the country’s highest court - his last resort - to come to his aid, arguing his constitutional rights were infringed when five SCA judges unanimously overturned the culpable homicide verdict and replaced it with murder.
Oscar: what papers filed to ConCourt say
In papers filed earlier this month, Andrew Fawcett, a member of the athlete's legal team, said the SCA judgment rested on three errors in law. These included that the SCA “exceeded its limited jurisdiction” and that it acted “unlawfully and unconstitutionally when it rejected the factual findings of the trial court and replaced them with a contrary finding of its own”.
But advocate Andrea Johnson, a member of the prosecution team, said in the State’s opposition to the latest appeal that the SCA delivered a well-reasoned judgment and that its conclusion of a murder verdict was beyond reproach.
Read: Oscar verdict: what the experts say
“There exists no reasonable prospect of success on appeal. The SCA committed no errors of law and the arguments by the applicant (Pistorius) are without merit and contrived. It is not in the interests of justice to grant leave to appeal,” Johnson said.
She argued that the SCA in fact acted with great circumspection and erred on the side of caution when it dealt with its right to interfere with the decision by trial judge Thokozile Masipa when she initially convicted Pistorius of culpable homicide for the killing of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.
Johnson said the SCA even accepted Judge Masipa’s finding on Pistorius’s credibility and confirmed that “one really does not know what his explanation is for having fired the fatal shots”.
Pistorius’s reasoning throughout is that because he believed Reeva was in the bedroom when he fired the fatal four shots in the early hours of Valentine’s Day 2013, he could not be guilty of murder under the doctrine of dolus eventualis.
Johnson, in her submissions, said it is “remarkable that Pistorius persists with this line of flawed reasoning”.
The SCA earlier found that in firing the four shots into the door of the small toilet cubicle, Pistorius should have foreseen that he could hit whoever was behind the door. “He fired four shots through the door and never offered an acceptable explanation for doing so,” the judges said at the time.
Johnson also said Pistorius only has himself to blame for the negative comments of both the trial court and the SCA on his credibility. “The end result is that there exists no credible explanation by the applicant for the killing.”
Johnson said the SCA was correct in concluding that Pistorius did foresee the risk of unlawfully killing whoever was behind the door. He accepted that risk but nevertheless pulled the trigger - four times.
Pistorius is under house arrest at his uncle’s Waterkloof home. He is back in court on April 18.
Pretoria News