Lawyers for the jailed former Olympic 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 making an appeal to try to get the verdict changed, and have him convicted of murdering Reeva Steenkamp, his girlfriend.
Pistorius was jailed for five years last year after shooting Ms Steenkamp four times through a locked bathroom door on Valentine’s Day 2013. The culpable homicide verdict is the South African equivalent of manslaughter.
Judge Thokozile Masipa, the judge who convicted him, decided yesterday 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 would be tantamount to reviewing my own decision,” Judge Masipa said. “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.
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A video of Pistorius playing football with Radovan Krejcír, a former mafia boss from the Czech Republic, has gone viral. Krejcír was apparently shot by a fellow inmate while awaiting trial and is in the hospital ward where Pistorius has spent the past four months. The video shows them taking penalties at each other in an exercise yard. There had been reports that Pistorius was much thinner because he was not eating the prison food for fear of being poisoned.