Good. Scumbag.
Just over three years after he fatally shot and killed his girlfriend, South African Olympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius has reached the end of the road: A curt, one-page order from the highest court in the country denied him a chance to appeal his murder conviction.
Pistorius will appear in Pretoria’s High Court on March 18 to face sentencing after the Constitutional Court dismissed his appeal “for lack of prospects of success.”
The prosecution will argue for a sentence of at least 15 years at next month’s hearing, a spokesman for the National Prosecuting Authority told local news media. It had argued in papers filed to the Constitutional Court that it was not in the interests of justice for Pistorius to be allowed to appeal the murder conviction.
The athlete shot his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, in the early hours of Valentine’s Day 2013, firing four high-powered bullets into the small toilet cubicle where she was standing. He used a cricket bat to break down the door and carried her downstairs, where she died.
Pistorius said during his murder trial that he thought she was an intruder and never intended to kill anyone…
The murder conviction isn’t a finding that Pistorius knew Steenkamp was in the toilet cubicle and intended to kill her. Under a principle in South African law known as dolus eventualis, the identity of the victim was not important, just the fact that Pistorius knew someone was in the cubicle and that firing four shots might kill the person.
“He must have foreseen and therefore did foresee that the person he was firing at behind the door might be fatally injured,” said Judge Eric Leach in December, reading the appeals court judgment.
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