Oscar: The Last Defence

Without much ado, court resumed on Monday for what is expected to be the last lap of the Oscar Pistorius trial for the premeditated murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp on February 14, 2013.

At the request of advocate for the state, Gerrie Nel, Oscar has spent this past month as an out-patient at Weskoppies Psychiatric Hospital after forensic psychiatrist Dr Merryll Vorster testified for the defence that Oscar suffered from a generalised anxiety disorder (GAD).

The court heard that the report compiled by a team of psychiatric specialists, which was handed to Judge Thokozile Masipa, had found Oscar has no mental defect and that he is mentally capable of distinguishing right from wrong and fit to stand trial. (This does not rule out that Oscar suffers from GAD.) No other information from the report was forthcoming.

From the start of this very public trial, it’s both enthralled and enraged a global public who first fell in love with Oscar’s determined spirit to compete against the able-bodied athletes at the 2012 Olympic Games. A striking image on his prosthetic limbs, he earned the affectionate nickname Blade Runner and became an overnight sensation.

But following events of that tragic Valentine’s night when Reeva lost her life and Oscar’s life changed forever, an overwhelming number of shocked supporters watched the trial and angrily fell out of love with him as he sobbed and spewed his way through witness testimony.

Yesterday, he sat quietly as opposing counsels – for the defence and the state – accepted the report’s findings, thus allowing proceedings to continue.

Barrie Roux called his first defence witness, orthopaedic surgeon Dr Gerald Versfeld, who has known and treated Oscar since he was a baby. He suggested the double amputation and conducted the surgery.

Versveld spoke of Oscar’s fear of dangerous situations and of his vulnerability and unsteadiness on his stumps. According to the doctor, it is a struggle for Oscar to get around without his prosthetics and the soft tissue around his stumps is “very, very mobile” and the heel pad slips backwards when he puts weight on it, causing pain and instability.

Judge Masipa and her assessors were asked to come down from the bench for a demonstration. Their close-up ecounter of Oscar without his prostheses was relatively private and off-camera.

Cross-examining Versveld, Nel said that according to the athlete’s own version of events, Oscar hadn’t fallen when armed with a gun in the pitch dark, he had walked on his stumps from the bedroom to the toilet where he killed Reeva by firing four shots into the toilet door.

Versfeld had to concede that if it were pitch dark, it’s “unlikely” that Oscar would have been able to walk on his stumps without falling over things reportedly on the floor, including an extension cord.

It later became clear that while visible in early police photos, the extension cord had disappeared and is not in the state’s possession.

Judge Masipa said she was “very unhappy” about the disappearance of the cord and ordered that an affidavit be produced by whoever was in charge of house contents.

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Ivan Lin, an electrical engineer who works as an acoustics expert, was the second witness called yesterday. His highly technical information was hard to follow but his major contribution was that he disputed that Oscar’s neighbours could have told the difference between a male and female voice at a distance of 177m.

It looks as if the absurd notion of Oscar sounding like a woman when he screams has been ditched in favour of the notion that it’s hard to accurately determine the gender of voices over distance.

Lin also highlighted a number of variables that impact on how we perceive sounds including temperature, wind and atmospheric pressure.

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On Tuesday July 1, Roux called Oscar’s manager Peet van Zyl to the stand.

An evasive witness, he did little to support the case for the defence and surprisingly, Gerrie Nel knew nothing of his inclusion as a witness.

His main contribution was to show a loving relationship between Oscar and Reeva. He insisted she was the first girlfriend who Oscar had told him he wanted to accompany him on a trip, “so Reeva could see what his world was about”.

Nel raised a complaint from Oscar’s roommate at the London 2012 Paralympic Games who asked to move because he said Oscar was always arguing on the phone.

In response, Van Zyl said there were only two occasions where he’d seen Oscar lose his temper. On the first, a camera crew in Barcelona called Oscar a cheat and on the second, during an interview at the BBC the interviewer asked whether Oscar wasn’t an embarrassment to his country for trying to compete in the Olympics, and Oscar walked out of the studio.

At mid-day, Gerrie Nel asked the judge to allow him more time to prepare further questions for Peet van Zyl.

Cross-examination will resume on Wednesday morning.