THE CASE FOR THE DEFENCE
Chase Your Shadow
John Carlin
In the early hours of February 14, 2013, Oscar Pistorius, South African Paralympian athlete, heard a noise coming from his bathroom. Seizing the loaded gun he always kept by his bed, Pistorius shouted to his girlfriend, the blonde model Reeva Steenkamp, to call the police, and made his way to the bathroom, screaming at the supposed burglar in the toilet to get out. When the burglar didn’t answer Pistorius fired four bullets through the locked door.
As the world knows, there was no burglar. The person behind the door was Reeva. She died almost instantly. When the police arrived they found Pistorius sobbing over her blood-stained corpse. They listened to his story and didn’t believe a word of it. They were convinced that he and Reeva had had a bitter row, and that it had ended with him shooting her dead.
A lot of people around the world agreed with the police, both then and now. In fact, the reaction on the street and on the internet at the end of Pistorius’s trial when the murder charge was dismissed and he was found guilty of the lesser charge of culpable homicide was so hostile that the judge, Thokozile Masipa, had to be given police protection.
The Pistorius casese hass stirred up passions to a degree not seen since the OJ Simpson trial, and there are many who believe that Reeva Steenkamp was as badly served by the justice system as Nicole Simpson.
I confess I was among those puzzled by the verdict, but after reading the journalist and author John Carlin’s impressively up-to-the-minute account of the trial and the events that led to it, I think Judge Masipa probably got it right. It’s true that the judge found aspects of Pistorius’s story hard to swallow and she criticised him as a poor witness, but these strictures apply equally to the prosecution.
As Carlin demonstrates in methodical detail, the theory of premeditated murder was based entirely on circumstantial evidence, and the collective testimony of the prosecution witnesses undermined rather than strengthened their case. Far from establishing a motive for murder, u de , the tee evidenced heard at trial suggests that Pistorius a and Reeva were d devoted to each o other. Carlin’s book is unlikely to be the last w word on the m matter. But his ev evident fairness, co cool objectivity an and robust scepticism make him a hard act to follow.