Pretoria - Oscar Pistorius heaved a sigh of relief, tears streaming down his face and mucus flowing freely from his nose.
“The State has not proven beyond reasonable doubt that the accused is guilty of premeditated murder,” Judge Thokozile Masipa said in delivering her verdict in the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria on Thursday.
In a courtroom packed with journalists, members of the public and the Pistorius and Steenkamp families, Judge Masipa shred the State’s case to pieces, absolving Pistorius of the alternative charge of murder as well.
The State had argued that Pistorius shot and killed Reeva Steenkamp in a fit of rage following a heated argument in the early hours of February 14 last year.
Fearing for her life, she had run screaming to the bathroom, locking herself inside the toilet.
But while Judge Masipa found witnesses who testified to having heard “blood-curdling screams” of a woman to be honest, she dismissed all assertions that Steenkamp had screamed for help as the gunshot to her head would have rendered her unconscious.
“The shots were fired in quick succession. This means the deceased would have been unable to shout or scream. The only person who would have screamed is the accused.
“None of the witnesses have heard the accused scream, let alone when he’s anxious. Even Samantha Taylor (Pistorius’s former girlfriend) had to concede that she had never heard the accused scream when he was in a threatened situation,” Judge Masipa said.
While Pistorius was overcome by emotion, his family sat stoically behind him, springing to action and rallying around him only for prayer when the judge adjourned proceedings for a tea break.
But while it appears the Paralympian may be slapped with a verdict carrying only a 15-year jail term or a suspended sentence – for culpable homicide, as opposed to the life term the State had hoped for – experts warned on Thursday that it was premature for Pistorius to celebrate as there were legal provisions for State prosecutor Gerrie Nel to put him back in the dock for a retrial.
Wits Law School Professor James Grant said: “The interesting thing is that the State is allowed in exceptional circumstances to appeal when the court makes a mistake of law. So Gerrie Nel can put Oscar back on the stand again.”
Asked about the law of double jeopardy – trying an accused person twice for the same crime – Grant said the law provided for the State to try an accused person again in cases in which a judge appeared to have misinterpreted the law or mixed up issues.
“The strange thing is that the judgment seemed to have been that he didn’t intend to kill anybody at all. Certainly, it is at odds with his (Pistorius’s) defence of putative private defence.
“I think it arose from an error of law on her part where she did an analysis of whether we were dealing with error in objecto (murder is murder, irrespective of who the accused intended to kill) or abberatio (whether a person had intention to kill or not).
“She got her analysis right, concluding that it didn’t matter for purposes of our law, but then she applied that to ‘did Oscar foresee the possibility of killing whoever was behind the door?’.
“Instead of asking that question, she moved from her analysis of error… to apply it to dolus eventualis (awareness of the likelihood of killing).
“The question is whether he could have killed whoever was behind the door. But her question was: did he see the possibility of killing Reeva?, and the answer to that is no.
“Whereas, had she asked the right question: did he foresee the possibility of killing whoever was behind the door?, she would have ruled differently – a finding of murder,” said Grant.
Judge Masipa was expected to resume her ruling on Friday morning by continuing with the issue of culpable homicide.
On Thursday, she said she was not “convinced that a reasonable person with the accused’s disability would have fired four shots in the toilet cubicle”, saying Pistorius “knew there was a person behind the toilet door” and ought to have known better as he was “competent in the use of firearms as he had undergone training”.
“Did the accused fail to take steps he should have taken to guard against the consequences? The answer is yes,” said Judge Masipa.
The Star