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No, this isn’t an old story, the guy’s at it again, and reckons that every day he is still detained is an infringement on his fundamental rights.

Pistorius wants the Constitutional Court to address the “utter confusion” he says the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) has created about when his murder sentence came into force – and declare that he is, in fact, eligible for parole.

In a story that gripped the entire world, Pistorius went on trial for murder after he shot and killed his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp in the early hours of Valentine’s Day 2013, after opening fire on her while she was standing behind his closed bedroom toilet door.

He maintained he believed she was an intruder, but the SCA found that even if he believed that he was shooting at an intruder, he must have ‘reasonably foreseen’ that whoever was behind that door would die.

As such, it said, he was guilty of murder under the principle of dolus eventualis.

“It goes without saying that the confusion is to be determined finally as a matter of relative urgency,” the former Paralympian stated in papers filed at the apex court earlier this month.

“Every day that I am detained and prohibited from applying for parole in circumstances that I am already eligible for parole and might be successful to obtain parole constitutes an infringement on my fundamental rights.”

Debates over when Pistorius’s sentence came into effect resulted in the SCA issuing and retracting multiple sentencing orders and “clarifications”. The last such “clarification” was issued after the lawyer representing Reeva’s parents raised questions about whether Pistorius was eligible for parole with the Correctional Services Parole Board’s chairperson.

According to a News24 exclusive, (brought to you by thorn-in-Zuma’s-side reporter, Karyn Maughan), parole authorities contend that Pistorius – who had started serving the six-year murder sentence in 2016 – will only be eligible for parole in August 2024.

He however insists his second murder sentence should have been antedated to 6 July 2016, the day that he had started serving his first murder sentence. Pistorius says he had, in fact, become eligible for parole when his possible release was mooted and then refused by parole authorities in March.

“It is disconcerting that such important and invasive decisions are taken, without having called on representations on my part.”

In his application for direct access to the apex court, Pistorius argues that “the sequence of unfortunate and conflicting orders” issued by the SCA – in relation to when his sentence for the murder of Steenkamp began – has resulted in a 16-year-four-month term.

This, he says, is a year, four months more than the 15-year minimum sentence that the SCA found he had qualified for in November 2017.

The application comes just before the Steenkamp’s plan to celebrate what would have been Reeva’s 40th birthday on 19 August.

After requesting an opportunity to meet with Reeva’s parents in a “victim-offender dialogue”, Pistorius met with Barry Steenkamp on 22 June last year.

Barry was quoted in the Daily Mail: “I told Oscar directly that he had shot my daughter deliberately and he denied it. He stuck to his story that he thought it was an intruder. After all these years we are still waiting for him to admit he did it in anger. That is all we wanted. If he told me the truth, he would have been a free man by now and I would have let the law take its course over his parole.”

Aborted court litigation has previously revealed that Pistorius’s release has been universally supported by his prison social worker, psychologists, unit manager and head of recreation.

Quite whether the one-time hero would be accepted back into a society that watched with horrified fascination as he tried to wash his hands of any guilt is another story altogether.

We all still remember Reeva, but would be happy to just forget this guy.

[source:news24]