Lawyers for the jailed former athlete Oscar Pistorius have failed to block an appeal against his conviction for culpable homicide.
The prosecution in Pistorius’s trial is in the process of launching an appeal to try to get the verdict changed, and instead to have him convicted of the murder of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp. The Paralympic gold medal-winner’s lawyer, Barry Roux, has however made an application that the judge, Thokozile Masipa, was wrong to grant an appeal.
Pistorius was jailed for five years last year after shooting Ms Steenkamp four times through a locked bathroom door on Valentine’s Day 2013.
Judge Masipa, the same judge who convicted him of culpable homicide, South Africa’s equivalent of manslaughter, decided today that the law would not allow her either to grant or refuse the Olympic sprinter’s application to stop prosecutors appealing.
“In my view, to entertain this application will be tantamount to reviewing my own decision,” Judge Masipa said.
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“For one thing there is really nothing new in the submissions by counsel for the applicant.”
The athlete could be out of prison by the time an appeal is heard, as he may be released on house arrest after serving ten months of his sentence. An appeal to South Africa’s Supreme Court in Bloemfontein is a lengthy process.
Despite reports of a much thinner Pistorius not eating prison food because of a fear of being poisoned, a video of him playing football with a cellmate has gone viral. The cellmate, Radovan Krejčíř, is a notorious former Mafia boss from the Czech Republic who is awaiting trial in the same hospital ward in which Pistorius has spent the past four months.
Apparently shot by a fellow inmate, the video shows Krejčíř and Pistorius taking it in turns to shoot penalties at each other in an exercise yard.