Cape Town – Paralympian Oscar Pistorius will learn on Thursday whether the Supreme Court of Appeal will convict him of murder for killing his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.
“The judgement in the Oscar Pistorius case appeal matter will be at the Supreme Court of Appeal (Bloemfontein), on Thursday, 3 December 2015, at 09:45am,” the office of the chief justice said in a statement on Tuesday.
Pistorius was convicted in 2014 of culpable homicide and sentenced to five years in prison for fatally shooting Steenkamp through a locked toilet door in 2013. He argued in court that he had believed an intruder was hiding in the cubicle.
In the state’s appeal, senior prosecutor Gerrie Nel asked the SCA to impose a verdict of murder instead.
Nel told the bench of five judges that Pretoria High Court Judge Thokozile Masipa had erred in her application of the legal principle of dolus eventualis, and that she had been wrong to conclude that Pistorius, a firearms enthusiast, had not foreseen that firing four shots into the door was likely to kill or injure the person behind it.
He argued that Masipa had been wrong to dismiss circumstantial evidence that showed that Pistorius’s version of events was impossible.
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