Who are you to judge? – The Pistorius issue
Reality check to all who declared Oscar Pistorius guilty, given their experience of 15 tweets is nothing compared to the 15 years of experience Judge Masipa has.
One of the most hilarious and ridiculous comments was from Donald Trump’s twitter account – apparently calling Judge Thokozile Masipa a moron. Not only that, some played around with Masipa’s surname; describing her judgement as ‘masepa’ (sh%#).
I would imagine the large amount of social media comments were made by people who are clueless about the law applied in making the judgement. While others believe the justice system is failing, that is not true at all; the public needs to understand the law and how it is applied. Now, just because you have an opinion, it does not mean it is true and should be accepted as such, this includes my opinion by the way.
I am nowhere near having a law degree or any law qualification for that matter, but there is one thing I have, a basic understanding of how the law is applied in South Africa.
With regard to the Oscar Pistorius judgement; we need to realise that when Oscar went to court, it was not his team’s duty to prove his innocence; but the state’s responsibility to prove he is guilty of murder.
The defence team presented a version, which if you closely followed the case, was found to be reasonably possible, based on testimonies from other witnesses besides Oscar’s own testimony. According to what the court heard, he was praying to God moments after he realised what he had done. “Please let her live…” were the words he uttered in front of one of the witnesses.
The state on the other hand spent a lot of time trying to discredit each witness from the defence team, after they failed to prove their accusation to be reasonably true.
Let’s play this scene again; witnesses hear screaming, to some it was a woman’s scream followed by a man’s scream. At the same time the defence put up an argument which could reasonably be true… some of the screams before the ‘shooting’ could have been from Oscar. Basically, the state could not prove beyond reasonable doubt that Oscar intentionally killed Reeva.
After observing the trial, Judge Masipa had no other option but to find Oscar not guilty of murder, but guilty of culpable homicide. The next time you feel the urge to pass judgement, please base your opinion on sustainable facts not emotion… Well done Judge Masipa, great job on the Oscar trial!
