South Africa's Supreme Court of Appeal grilled Oscar Pistorius' attorney and a prosecutor on Tuesday as it weighed whether to convict him of murder for killing his girlfriend, uphold a lower court's manslaughter conviction or order a retrial.
Prosecutors say the North Gauteng High Court erred in convicting Pistorius of the lesser charge, and that the double-amputee Olympian should have known that someone could be killed when he fired four times into a locked toilet cubicle in his home. In the trial last year, prosecutors said Pistorius killed Reeva Steenkamp as she sought shelter in the toilet cubicle during an argument on Valentine's Day 2013. The defense said Pistorius opened fire because he thought an intruder was about to burst out of the toilet.
One of the five appeals court judges noted during the session on Tuesday, broadcast across the country and around the world on live TV, that Pistorius could still be convicted of murder even if he didn't think it was Steenkamp in the cubicle but knew someone was in there. Under the concept of dolus eventualis in South African law, a person can be convicted of murder if they foresaw the possibility of someone dying through their actions and went ahead anyway.
"If you look at the photographs, there's room behind there for a toilet bowl and a person and just about nothing else," Justice Lorimer Leach said to defense lawyer Barry Roux. "There's nowhere to hide. It would be a miracle if you didn't shoot someone." |
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