In October 2015, Oscar Pistorius, the South African double amputee Olympian runner sentenced to five years’ jail for the culpable homicide of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp on Valentine’s Day 2013, was released for correctional supervision.
He spent 10 months behind bars, and will now be under house arrest.
The world’s media gathered outside Pistorius’ uncle’s home in Waterkloof, near Pretoria, South Africa, for a glimpse of the athlete, but the family instead sent out spokeswoman and former journalist Anneliese Burgess, who said: “He is simply entering the next phase of his sentence now. He will serve this under strict conditions that govern correctional supervision.”
Pistorius’ prosecutors have now appealed to the Supreme Court to scale up his sentence from culpable homicide to murder.
Karin van Eck, a lawyer at Clarke & Van Eck Attorneys in Pretoria, says the situation could change.
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June Steenkamp, Reeva Steenkamp’s mother.
“If the state is successful in their appeal, then that would mean that he’s found guilty of murder and that would influence the sentencing and he doesn’t qualify for correctional supervision,” says van Eck.
The courtroom dramas that sent the athlete to prison in 2014 had been watched by the world. People wondered what was going to happen to him; but what about Reeva?
Thousands expressed outrage over Pistorius being the focal point of the trial, prompting #HerNameWasReevaSteenkamp to trend in defiance.
Reeva’s mother June Steenkamp was the face of the family throughout the trial but broke her silence for her book Reeva: A Mother’s Story, released in 2014.
In addition, June has now launched a foundation to help women and children who are victims of domestic abuse as her way of keeping her daughter’s legacy alive.
In October 2015, dressed in a black jacket, June had addressed students at her daughter’s old school in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, saying: “I will now carry on where she left off”. She read out excerpts of the speech her daughter was going to make to students the day she died.
In the televized address, she also said: “I have got no feelings of revenge. I don’t want to hurt [Pistorius]. He is already a disabled person. I did not want him to be thrown into jail and suffering because I don’t wish suffering on anyone and that’s not going to bring Reeva back.”
Nooshin Erfani-Ghadimi, project manager at Wits Justice Project, a program of the journalism department at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, reckons the wheels of justice turn slowly, and the case is not over, yet.
“What we want to see, in order to have a fair and just system, is the same amount of attention being paid, as has been paid to Oscar’s case, as to the myriad of cases in the system which are the cause of miscarriages of justice for victims, families, the accused and their families too.”
The jury is still out.
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