Roux: ‘You have not favoured the court’
State witness Charl Johnson was criticised for not presenting an independent version of what he heard on the night Oscar Pistorius shot dead his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, the High Court in Pretoria heard on Wednesday.
Oscar Pistorius’s uncle Arnold Pistorius, right, talks with his lawyer Barry Roux, left, at the end the court session at the high court in Pretoria, South Africa, Monday, March 3, 2014. Pistorius is charged with murder for the shooting death of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, on Valentines Day in 2013. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe, POOL)
“You have not favoured the court with a strong, independent version,” Barry Roux, for Pistorius, told Johnson during cross-examination.
“What worries me… This court really is entitled… that witnesses come to court not contaminated.
“Maybe you and your wife should have stood together in the witness box,” Roux told him.
Judge Thokozile Masipa intervened and addressed Roux.
“Aren’t you going a bit far?” she asked.
Roux agreed and stopped his line of questioning.
He had noted “remarkable coincidences” between Johnson’s statement to police and that of his wife, first State witness Michelle Burger.
The couple’s townhouse is 177m from Pistorius’s. Both have testified they heard screams and gunshots from Pistorius’s home in the early hours of February 14 last year.
The State will try to prove that Pistorius committed premeditated murder when he shot Steenkamp through the toilet door in his Pretoria home. In addition he is charged with illegal possession of a firearm and ammunition, and recklessly discharging a firearm in public.
Pistorius contends he mistook her for an intruder when he shot through the toilet door.
– Sapa
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