Court D-day for O’Sullivan

Forensic consultant Paul O’Sullivan will find out today if a high court review of a magistrate’s decision not to recuse herself from his fraud case was successful.

O’Sullivan was charged with fraud for allegedly misrepresenting himself as working for Alice Johnston, while apparently working for her alleged former lover and prominent businessperson, James Murray.

Murray had been shot several times in 2014 and Johnston had been arrested.

In an effort to clear her name, she had hired O’Sullivan who, Johnston alleged, was already working for Murray.

O’Sullivan accused her of being involved in Murray’s shooting.

At O’Sullivan’s last appearance, magistrate Gail Pretorius was asked to recuse herself on the grounds she was no longer impartial and had become hostile towards the state and prosecutor Jabulani Mlotshwa.

Johnston’s about-face of O’Sullivan’s interrogation techniques began the fiasco.

“I felt at the time that he was shouting. The video has now proved that he was not shouting, but it was confrontational,” Johnston said at the time.

“So you are now saying that he was not shouting at you,” Mlotshwa asked Johnston, to which she replied in the affirmative.

Mlotshwa then wanted to declare Johnston – his only witness – a hostile witness because she was “deviating from what she said in her evidence-in-chief”, but Pretorius slapped this down.

“You know the difference between a hostile witness and a witness you want to discredit?”

But Mlotshwa persisted and when his appeal failed, called for Pretorius’ recusal.