Oscar’s 1st year in jail, five to go ‘Y
Fans send heartfelt messages
OUR smile will see us again. God will heal what hurts. Stand strong as you remain my golden boy. You are one in a million.”
This is one of the messages on social media pouring in this week from all over the world by members of the Support for Oscar group, as they marked a year since the Blade Runner went back to jail.
Oscar Pistorius returned to jail a year ago last Thursday to start serving his six-year jail term for the 2013 Valentine’s Day killing of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.
While the media hype around the once golden boy’s incarceration has died down, his supporters had clearly not forgotten him. Messages of encouragement, posted often on social media platforms, intensified on special occasions, such as this week.
“I am not asking you to be strong, my boy, because you have not been anything else. I beg you not to give up or lose faith,” another supporter wrote. The message, in the form of a poem from a female fan, ended with the encouragement that “the light will reach you once again. Please hold out until then”.
While the Department of Correctional Services said Pistorius was doing well in jail and adjusting to his circumstances, his advocate Barry Roux, in papers filed with the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) in Bloemfontein, said the looming appeal proceedings by the State against Pistorius’s “lenient” six-year jail term for murder was hanging like a sword over his head.
“On July 6, 2016 he returned to prison to commence serving the six-year-jail sentence. Then the State applied for leave to appeal. Since then the respondent (Oscar) had to await the outcome of the present proceedings, further prolonging the agony caused by uncertainty,” Roux said.
Former chief prosecutor in the high-profile trial, Gerrie Nel, expressed his shock and dissatisfaction a year ago after Judge Thokozile Masipa sentenced Pistorius for a second time – this time to a six-year jail sentence for murder. At the time, Nel stormed stony-faced out of the courtroom.
This was soon followed by an application to the SCA, in which he vehemently objected to what he had referred to as a severely lenient sentence. The SCA said it would hear oral argument in this regard, but nearly a year later, the matter had yet to be heard.
As senior official close to the case said this week that they anticipated the appeal would only be heard towards the end of the year.
With a year in jail under his belt, Pistorius will have to remain in prison for at least another two – three of his sixyear-jail term – before he is considered for parole.
He served the first few months at Pretoria’s Kgosi Mampuru II Prison before being transferred to a smaller prison in Atteridgeville, west of Pretoria, at the end of last year.
Correctional Services at the time said it was more suitable to his needs as a double amputee.
Roux, meanwhile, said in his latest papers filed with the SCA that there was no prospect of the State succeeding in its application to up the former Olympic champion’s sentence. He said the sentence was equivalent to an eight-year jail sentence, because, in 2014, he had been convicted of culpable homicide and spent a year in prison.
Roux said Pistorius’s first stint in jail could be described as solitary confinement, because his special needs prevented him from sharing a cell with other inmates. He was kept in the prison’s hospital section.
When he was released, he was placed under house arrest at his uncle Arnold Pistorius’s Waterkloof mansion.
He remained under strict house arrest for seven months during 2015, until he had to return to jail to serve his latest six year jail sentence after the State successfully appealed against Masipa’s culpable homicide verdict.
The SCA replaced it with murder and ordered the judge to resentence him.
Roux said it had been accepted by the court that Pistorius did not want to kill Steenkamp when he fired four shots into the toilet door of his Pretoria East home. He said he believed there were intruders behind the door and Steenkamp was still in bed.