PRETORIA – Oscar Pistorius shuffled through court without his prosthetic legs on Wednesday to show how vulnerable he is as the Paralympian seeks to avoid prison for murdering his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.
The 29-year-old faces a minimum 15-year jail term for the Valentine’s Day killing in 2013 in a case that has attracted worldwide interest and divided South Africa. He will be sentenced on July 6.
Pistorius has always said he mistook Steenkamp for an intruder when he fired four shots through a locked toilet door in his Pretoria home, killing her almost instantly.
During his closing arguments, defence lawyer Barry Roux asked the gold medallist, known as the “Blade Runner” for his carbon-fibre prosthetics, to walk on his stumps to show the difficulty he faced dealing with the threat of an intruder.
The lower parts of his legs were amputated when he was a baby.
His body shaking with emotion, Pistorius removed his prosthetics and stood on his stumps for about five minutes in front of the court television camera, wiping away tears with a tissue.
“The accused was vulnerable because of his disability,” Roux said. “His failure to conduct a rational thought process does not negate his vulnerability.”
The defence says Pistorius did not deliberately kill model and law graduate Steenkamp and was “a broken man”, calling for a non-custodial sentence that includes community service.
A state prosecutor argued that Pistorius – who did not take the stand himself – had shown no remorse or told the court why he fired the shots, and asked the court jail the athlete for the prescribed minimum sentence of 15-years.
The athlete originally received a five-year sentence for a manslaughter conviction, that was upgraded to murder on appeal. The original trial judge, Thokozile Masipa, was presiding at the hearings at the Pretoria High Court. (Reuters)
