South African athlete Óscar Pistorius, convicted of the 2013 murder of his girlfriend, model Reeva Steenkamp, will hold a hearing this Friday to decide whether he will remain on parole, local media report.
In a statement released on Monday, South Africa’s Department of Corrections explained that a parole board would investigate the Pistorius case and decide “whether the prisoner is suitable for social integration or not.”
The hearing will take place after the South African Constitutional Court ruled last October that the athlete may be eligible for parole.
Pistorius had asked the Constitutional Court to entitle him to benefits after he was granted conditional discharge in March.
This is what the athlete claimed that his prison sentence was unjustly extended to the minimum necessary to qualify for this measure, which is a “rape” within the meaning of “Fundamental Rights”.
Pistorius asked the 2022 Pretoria High Court to order a parole hearing, arguing that he had served more than half the sentence, a requirement under South African law to qualify for this measure .
But on March 31, the parole board concluded that “the prisoner has not served the minimum detention period and scheduled August 2024 for a new consultation process.
However, the Constitutional Court confirmed in October that “the applicant had served half his sentence until March 21, 2023.”
After a trial that attracted worldwide media attention, Pistorius was initially sentenced to five years in prison for manslaughter in October 2014 if the judiciary ruled there were mitigating circumstances, but the Public Prosecution Service appealed the sentence.
In November 2015, the South African Supreme Court quashed this conviction and found him guilty of murder, and referred the case back to the court, which sentenced Pistorius to six years in prison for murder in July 2016.
However, after another appeal by the Public Prosecution Service, the Supreme Court increased the sentence in November 2017 to fifteen years, the minimum provided by law in murder cases, except in exceptional situations.
In practice, this trial meant thirteen years and five months in prison, not counting the time that Pistorius – who had spent some time on bail and under house arrest – had already spent in prison.
Pistorius is jailed for shooting Steenkamp at his Pretoria home on Valentine’s Day 2013, when he was at the height of his fame and had amassed a fortune during his sporting career.
You were shot four times through the closed bathroom door and tried in vain to defend during the trial that you had panicked and mistook Steenkamp for a burglar who had entered the house through the bathroom window.
(With information from EFE)
Source: La Neta Neta
I’m George Gonzalez, a professional journalist and author at The Nation View. With more than 5 years of experience in the field, I specialize in covering sports news for various print media outlets. My passion for writing has enabled me to craft stories that capture the attention of readers all over the world.
