Oscar has lost everything – Barry Roux

“He was on the rise,” his lawyer Barry Roux told the court during closing arguments for sentencing.

“He’s lost his immovable property. He’s lost his moveable property. He’s lost his sponsors. It’s a person that’s down and out. He’s broke.

“He has nothing. He hasn’t even money to pay for expenses.”

Arguing to have his client spared a jail sentence, Roux referred to a book “Ubuntu and the Law” which deals with a move towards restorative justice.

He said society had become used to the idea that prison was the punishment of choice. Instead he called for punishment that addressed the interest of all parties.

Pistorius wiped tears from his eyes as Roux spoke.

Roux referred to case law, where one Warren Vorster had shot and killed his domestic worker’s son, thinking the boy was being attacked in the Zozo hut in his garden. The shot went through the window and the boy was struck in the head.

“Mr Vorster was beside himself with pain, grief, and remorse.”

The boy’s mother felt her son had “died like an animal”, Roux said.

The court imposed a community-based sentence.

On September 12 Judge Thokozile Masipa found Pistorius guilty of the culpable homicide of model and law graduate Steenkamp, but not guilty of her murder. Pistorius had claimed he thought there was a burglar in his toilet when he fired four shots through the locked door in the early hours of February 14 last year, killing Steenkamp.

Masipa found Pistorius guilty of discharging a firearm in public, when a shot from his friend Darren Fresco’s Glock pistol went off under a table at Tasha’s restaurant in Melrose Arch, Johannesburg, in January 2013.

Pistorius was found not guilty on two firearms-related charges – illegal possession of ammunition, and shooting through the open sunroof of a car with his 9mm pistol while driving with friends in Modderfontein on September 30, 2012.

– Sapa

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