Oscar Pistorius ‘to serve less than a year in jail’

Oscar Pistorius attends his sentencing. Picture: Reuters

The amputee athlete, known as the Bladerunner, stood staring straight ahead as Judge Thokozile Masipa announced his punishment for shooting dead the model on Valentine’s Day last year.

Pistorius, 27, was also given a suspended three-year sentence for a separate firearms offence.

The judge handed down a prison term for the charge of culpable homicide, saying she believed a non-custodial sentence would “send the wrong message to the community”.

Following the hearing, a member of Pistorius’s legal team claimed he is likely to serve a sixth of the sentence – around ten months – before being held under house arrest.

As she left court, the victim’s mother, June Steenkamp, was asked by reporters about suggestions that Pistorius would not serve the full five years in prison.

She said: “It doesn’t matter, he’s going to pay something.” Asked if she thought justice had been served, she said: “Yes.”

The model’s father, Barry, who suffered a stroke after her death, said: “We are satisfied.”

The jailed athlete’s uncle, Arnold Pistorius, said outside court that it had been a “harrowing 20 months”.

“This has been an incredibly hard, painful process for everyone involved,” he said. “We are all emotionally drained and exhausted.”

He also hit out at the prosecution case. “We said from the beginning that the state tried to force a puzzle into a position of premeditated murder,” he said.

“When they realised the fact that it didn’t fit, they changed this case to a mosaic when everything can opportunistically fit everywhere.”

He said the family accepted the sentence. “Oscar will embrace this opportunity to pay back to society.”

He added: “I hope Oscar will start his own healing process as he walks down the path of restoration.”

It is understood that the six-time Paralympic champion will be ineligible for athletic competition until he has served the full sentence.

This would mean he will not be free to compete in International Paralympic Committee events until 2019 but could in theory return for Tokyo 2020.

Pistorius killed Ms Steenkamp, 29, in the early hours of 14 February, 2013 when he fired his 9mm pistol four times through a closed toilet door at his luxury home. He insisted he thought he was firing at an intruder.

The courtroom was packed for the culmination of a case that has attracted intense scrutiny around the world. Interest was heightened by a ruling allowing some parts to be screened live on television.

After a summary of the evidence and related legal issues lasting more than an hour, the judge said: “Having regard to the circumstances of the matter, I am of the view that a non-custodial sentence would send the wrong message to the community.

“On the other hand, a long sentence would lack the element of mercy.”

Asking Pistorius to stand, she said: “The following is what I consider to be a sentence that is fair and just, both to society and to the accused.”

Earlier, the judge said South Africa had “long moved on” from an era of “an eye for an eye” justice.

She described Ms Steenkamp as “vivacious and full of life”. The court heard her parents in particular were “not coping very well without their daughter”.

Judge Masipa said: “Nothing I say or do today can reverse what happened to the deceased and to her family. Hopefully, this judgment shall provide some sort of closure for the family.”

She added: “It would be a sad day for this country if an impression were to be created that there was one law for the poor and disadvantaged, and another for the rich and famous.”

She said that she had a feeling of unease as she listened to “one witness after another” place an “over-emphasis on the accused’s vulnerability”.

She said that, while Pistorius is vulnerable, he has “excellent coping skills”, and pointed out that he went on to compete against able-bodied athletes, but she said: “For some reason, that picture remains obscured in the background.”

Judge Masipa criticised as “slapdash” evidence given during the trial which questioned the ability of prisons in South Africa to cope with Pistorius’s disability.

Fred Bridgland: Brutal prison life awaits in a system where gangs rule and sexual violence is the norm

Pistorius last night entered a penal system that is among the most violent on Earth.

South African prisons are riddled with a system of gangs that trace their origins back more than a century when they were formed in all-male compounds housing migrant labourers in the gold mines around Johannesburg.

Gang membership spread from the mines to the prisons, where many miners were detained in the apartheid era.

Each gang has quasi-military hierarchies and are known as the “numbers gangs”: among them are the 28s, 27s, 26s and Big Fives. Promotion is obtained by committing acts of violence on persons outside the gang. The “28” is the senior – and extremely violent – gang, specialising in an organised system of “wyfies”, or coerced homosexual partners.

Sexual violence is lamentably common. The UN described recently how a man was repeatedly raped in his cell by members of a “28 gang” and became HIV-positive.

Warders laughed at him when he complained and on release a nurse said simply: “This is what happens in prison.”

The UN said warders sometimes even encourage sexual violence. “Vulnerable inmates, such as those who are young, gay, new to prison, of small build, mentally disabled and non-aggressive, are often forced to provide sex – usually for the duration of their incarceration,” said the UN.

Another report, by South Africa’s prisons inspectorate, said sexual violence is widely accepted by prison authorities and inmates, while the trauma of HIV and Aids acquired in prison affects families and communities outside.

Katiza Cebekhulu, with whom I have just completed a book on Winnie Mandela, recalls his own experiences in jail in Zululand. “It was horrific,” he says. “When I refused to iron the clothes of a 28 gang leader, an older prisoner told me, ‘My brother, you’d better do what they tell you. Or you’ll be a dead boy’.”

• Fred Bridgland was The Scotsman’s South Africa correspondent for many years. His book Winnie Mandela, Nelson and Me, is due out later this year.