Chase Your Shadow by John Carlin Read Free Book Online Page B

lawyers not involved with the case, but as riveted by it as the general public, believed it would be impossible for him eventually to avoid serving time in prison, even if he was released on bail now. Under South African law to be acquitted of premeditated murder still left open the possibility of being found guilty of another, lesser charge. The judge would have the discretion to convict him of a lower category of murder, for which the sentence would also be jail. Or, what many lawyers believed would be the best option for him, to find him guilty of culpable homicide, or manslaughter, for which the range of sentencing possibilities was wide. He could be lucky in such an instance and get out on a suspended sentence, or unlucky and be ordered to serve fifteen years.
    Spared these gloomy reflections during the bail hearing, there came a moment in court when his defense team was presented with an unexpected gift. It came in the shape of Hilton Botha, the first police investigating officer to arrive at his home after the shooting. Botha was a blunt and hardened detective who had shown no sympathy for him as he knelt by Reeva’s body, wailing at the horror of what he had done. Now Botha received his comeuppance in court. He was supposed to have been there to further the prosecution’s case against bail; in the event, he ended up undermining it.
    Stirring memories of the O. J. Simpson case in the minds of American reporters present, it emerged that Botha had made a mess of the scene he had found at Pistorius’s home, stomping all over the place with apparent scant regard for safeguarding evidence and generally revealing himself, in the face of questioning by Barry Roux, to be an unreliable witness as well as a less than competent investigator.
    Botha had initially declared in court, led by Nel, that the fatal shots had been fired downwards into the bathroom door, which would have meant that Pistorius had had his prosthetic legs on, contradicting his account that he had been on his stumps. But when Roux put it to Botha that he had no evidence to support the contention that he was wearing his legs, Botha backed down and admitted that this was so.
    Botha said a female witness had heard an argument between two people at Pistorius’s home between two and three in the morning on the night in question, before the shooting happened. Under cross-examination by Roux, Botha conceded some uncertainty as to whether the witness had been 300 or 600 meters away at the time. Botha also agreed that the witness would not be able to know if the voices she heard belonged to Pistorius and Steenkamp. As for another claimmade by Botha, that he had found steroids at Pistorius’s home on the morning of the shooting, Roux convinced the court that there was no basis for it, that what he had thought were performance-enhancing drugs had in fact been innocuous herbal remedies.
    Roux’s case centered on demolishing the state’s case, but he also came up with a useful piece of counter-evidence in the shape of a female witness who knew Reeva well. This witness cast doubt on the state’s argument for premeditated murder by saying that her friend had been ‘very much in love’ with the accused.
    Nel fought back, telling the court that it was an indisputable fact that Pistorius had killed somebody and, questionable witnesses aside, that it seemed inexplicable that he would not have checked to see whether Reeva was in bed prior to seizing his gun from under it, that he would not have called out her name at the first sign of danger, or that she would not have screamed after he fired the first of the four bullets, alerting him to the fact that she was in the toilet. Nel added a populist touch to his arguments when he said that if Pistorius were granted bail it would be a slap in the face for South African women who had been victims of crime. He counseled the magistrate not merely to pay ‘lip service’ to the national cause of reducing crime against women, but