South African state prosecutors said Monday that they planned to appeal the conviction and sentence handed down to the track star Oscar Pistorius after a seven-month trial that ended last week in ferocious debate over the magnitude of his punishment and the judgment that underpinned it.
In a post on Twitter, Nathi Mncube, a spokesman for the National Prosecuting Authority, said the organization “will be appealing both the conviction and sentence.”
Mr. Pistorius, 27, was sentenced to a five-year jail term last week for culpable homicide, equivalent to manslaughter, in the killing of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, 29, on Feb. 14, 2013.
Under the terms of the sentence, he may be released into house arrest after 10 months.
Mr. Pistorius, a double amputee from infancy who achieved global fame, was acquitted of more serious murder charges.
The verdict and sentence drew harsh criticism from some South Africans, who thought that Mr. Pistorius had been treated too leniently. The prosecution had sought a 10-year term on the culpable homicide charge after pressing for the athlete to be convicted of premeditated murder, which carries a minimum sentence of 25 years.
Mr. Mncube said Gerrie Nel, the tenacious prosecutor who sought during the trial to prove that Mr. Pistorius intended to shoot Ms. Steenkamp, and his aides “had been studying the judgment, doing research and consulting legal experts to establish if there were sufficient grounds to lodge appeals.”
“The prosecutors are now preparing the necessary papers in order to be able to file within the next few days,” Mr. Mncube said, according to the South African Press Association.
The appeal of Mr. Pistorius’s conviction on a culpable homicide charge was “based on the question of law,” Mr. Mncube said.
“The merits and the demerits of the N.P.A.'s argument in this regard will become evident when we file papers for leave to appeal,” he said, referring to the National Prosecuting Authority.
Mr. Pistorius, who was also given a suspended three-year jail term on a separate firearms charge, began serving his sentence on Tuesday after Judge Thokozile Matilda Masipa handed down her sentence.
Mr. Pistorius had admitted to shooting Ms. Steenkamp to death with a handgun but said that he had fired through a locked toilet cubicle door in the mistaken belief that an intruder had entered his home.
The case provoked much soul-searching in South Africa, raising questions about the prevalence of gun violence.
Those worries surfaced anew late Sunday when the captain of South Africa’s national soccer team, Senzo Meyiwa, was shot to death in a robbery attempt near Johannesburg.
Over the weekend, June Steenkamp, Ms. Steenkamp’s mother, was quoted as saying in a new book that she and her husband, Barry, believed that their daughter had planned to break off her relationship with Mr. Pistorius.
“There is no doubt in our minds: She had decided to leave Oscar that night,” she was quoted as saying. She added that her daughter, a law graduate and model, “had not slept” with Mr. Pistorius because she was “scared to take the relationship to that level.”
While Ms. Steenkamp’s family said initially that they accepted the outcome of the trial, her mother has since been quoted as saying she was “shocked” that Mr. Pistorius was convicted only of culpable homicide.
Mr. Pistorius’s own family said they did not plan to appeal.
Jacqui Mofokeng, a spokeswoman for the Women’s League of the governing African National Congress party, which campaigns to halt widespread violence against women in South Africa, said last week that the group would seek an appeal. “This is sending a very, very wrong message out there,” she said.
The League has criticized Judge Masipa’s conviction of Mr. Pistorius on the lesser charge of culpable homicide on the grounds that she made an error in law, opening the way for an appeal. The argument, echoed by some other legal experts, is that under a principle know as “dolus eventualis,” Mr. Pistorius should have been held accountable for the consequences of actions that he could have foreseen.
In other words, if he knew someone — not necessarily Ms. Steenkamp — was inside the toilet cubicle and fired anyhow, “a murder did occur,” the League said in a statement.
A murder conviction on the grounds of “dolus eventualis,” also known as common murder, is a less serious offense than premeditated murder but could carry a term of 15 years. If the appeal is heard, a panel of senior judges will review how evidence and matters of law were dealt with at the trial, news reports said.
Mr. Pistorius is being held in the hospital wing of the Kgosi Mampuru II prison in Pretoria, formerly known as Pretoria Central.
Before the collapse of white rule in 1994, the prison achieved notoriety as the site of scores of executions of political detainees between the 1960s and the 1980s. Its current inmates include Eugene de Kock, the leader of an apartheid-era death squad who was sentenced in 1996 to two life terms and more than 200 years in prison.
Source :New York Times
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