Oscar facing renewed onslaught from State

THE SUPREME Court of Appeal (SCA) is all geared up to hear legal arguments in the State’s appeal against Oscar Pistorius’s six-year jail sentence.

The streets leading to the historical court building were yesterday lined with posters announcing that the appeal would be heard today.

While there were television trucks in December 2015 – on the eve of the State’s appeal against Pistorius’s conviction on culpable homicide – the media hype seemed to have worn off a bit. By late yesterday, only a lone media truck was parked outside the building.

It is, however, expected that members of the ANC Women’s League will support the parents of Reeva Steenkamp, who was killed by Pistorius on Valentine’s Day in 2013.

The parents of the blonde model, June and Barry Steenkamp, earlier said they planned to attend today’s proceedings. The women’s league also vowed to be in court.

This will be the second time that the parties headed to the SCA after the prosecution felt aggrieved by the verdict of Judge Thokozile Masipa.

The first time was to overturn the judge’s verdict of culpable homicide following the killing of Steenkamp. The State succeeded in that appeal when the SCA replaced it with a verdict of murder and referred it back to the trial court for sentencing.

Judge Masipa sentenced Pistorius for a second time, and in July last year he started to serve his six-year jail term.

The State is, however, set on appealing what it called a shockingly lenient sentence. The prosecution will argue that Judge Masipa had “undue sympathy” for Pistorius.

The sentence, according to the State, was not only shockingly lenient, but also “startlingly and disturbingly inappropriate”.

Pistorius, who is serving his jail term in the Atteridgeville Correctional Centre, west of Pretoria, shot Steenkamp four times in the early hours of the morning while she was behind the door of the toilet in his then-Silver Lakes home, east of Pretoria.

He maintained throughout his highprofile trial that he mistook her for an intruder in his house. He said he was terrified at the time and did everything in his might to protect himself and Steenkamp from the “intruder”.

The prosecution team, meanwhile, listed more than 30 points why they believed that the judge misdirected herself when she re-sentenced him.

The legal arguments were expected to last until about lunchtime, after which judgment was to be reserved.