Ag shame, poor murderer
IS it OK for a TV columnist to write about a broadcast event that she was physically incapable of finishing watching? I’m not sure what the protocol is, but I’m afraid I’m going to do it anyway — with reference to this week’s televising of Oscar Pistorius’s sentencing proceedings for murder.
There was an odd sense of homecoming when the cameras took us back into courtroom GD of the High Court in Pretoria, even if this time it wasn’t courtesy of a dedicated 24hour Oscar channel. Following on the original trial and the Supreme Court of Appeal hearing, it was a bit like the third season of a familiar drama. There were all the Pistorius and Steenkamp family members and hangers-on. There was our old pal Judge Thokozile Masipa, faced with the frankly bizarre task of having to sentence a man for murder who she’d previously decided wasn’t guilty of murder.
And there was Ozzy himself, his shoulders slumped in an appropriate spirit of dejection, his eyes downcast. Was he studying Bible verses, as we used to think? Or was he sending direct messages on Twitter to British glamazon Jordan, as she recently informed the media? If you’re about to be sent back to prison for killing a beautiful blonde model, what better way to take your mind off it than by messaging another beautiful blonde model?
I’m being unkind, of course, because we know that Pistorius is a paragon of chaste virtue. That’s what his psychologist Jonathan Scholtz said, when testifying in mitigation of sentence: “He often was approached by beautiful girls like models, but never reacted to their offers.” It was at this point during the broadcast — which was only about 20 minutes in — that I started to feel twinges of ill health.
That sensation was amplified in the moments to come, which induced nausea on a scale that I don’t remember experiencing since the Game of Thrones “Red Wedding” episode. Perhaps it was the way in which Pistorius’s psychologist insisted on referring to the murder of Reeva Steenkamp as “the incident”. Perhaps it was the moment when Scholtz asked the court to consider how badly it would suck for Pistorius to have his future children be able to Google images of the crime he committed. Perhaps it was the appeal to the “human frailty” which played a part in “the commission of this offence”.
Or perhaps it was the basic, underlying idea that the real victim in all of this was a millionaire sportsman who pumped four bullets into a woman. I have a high threshold for stomach-churning TV, but on this occasion I had to switch off.