BY GABRIEL PRINCEWILL
Six time Paralympic athlete, Oscar Pistorius was yesterday found guilty of murder by South Africa’s supreme court by a five strong panel of South Africa’s senior Judges following the overturning of an earlier manslaughter verdict by a lower court in the land. Pistorius killed his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp in February 2013 after shooting four times through a locked toilet door.
The lower court had found him guilty of culpable manslaughter on the disputed grounds that it was impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the Olympian intended to kill whomever was in the toilet when he fired his rifle through the door and eventually killed Steenkamp, his law graduate girlfriend.
The measuring criteria conventionally used in the legal arena is whether it can be definitively determined that the defendant foresaw that the consequences of his action would cause the prohibited consequence that resulted. Causation in the sense is made up of the degree of likelihood or probability that the resulting death would occur.
In this sense , the Supreme court of appeal has ruled that there were ”fundamental errors” in the original judgement, and the lower court did not correctly apply the rule of ”dolus eventualis”- that is the question of whether Pistorious knew that a death would be the likely result of his actions. The implication of the new ruling is that the hot headed Olympian knew that death would be the likely outcome of his action, and in that respect the killing was a murder, regardless of whether he actually knew it was his girlfriend in the toilet.
Common sense tells us that Pistorious in fact knew it was his girlfriend in the toilet, because no man in his right mind would fire shots at a toilet door to target a presumed and unconfirmed intruder, without first ascertaining the whereabouts of his girlfriend. His escape of a murder verdict in the original case was based on the erroneous but not unreasonable view that he may have recklessly failed to check the whereabouts of his girlfriend- the requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt was not hundred percent satisfied in the eyes of the previous judge-Thokozile Masipa. Masipa ruled that Pictorious had acted ”negligently”, in other words he was or ‘may have been’ merely careless or reckless in his actions.
However, the latest verdict presents a more intelligible finding of ‘intention’ based on the case facts. Pistorious intended and foresaw death as a likely consequence of his actions. This clearly suffices to put the case to bed and brand the talented amputee an evil murderer with an unrestrained temper. The couple were known to have frequent altercations, and Pistorious was a known loose canon whenever his temper got the better of him.
Former lovers of his had attested to the explosive anger that secretly characterized a highly acclaimed sports star who had little to no restraint on his temper. Insecurity in his one leg had surely become an anchor to a wicked temperament in desperate need of taming. The brute former celeb is currently under house arrest after spending one year of his original five year sentence in jail. He will return to court to be re-sentenced for murder.
Oscar Pistorious had his legs amputated below his knees as a baby and made history by becoming the first amputee sprinter to compete at the Olympics in 2012 running on prosthetic blades.