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Pretoria — Murder-convicted Paralympian Oscar Pistorius was electronically tagged yesterday following his successful bail application. Pistorius arrived at the Correctional Services’s Poynton Building in the Pretoria CBD at 14:00. Once he had entered the building, the glass doors were closed behind him. Journalists and photographers waited outside the gates to get a glimpse of the former athlete.
Correctional Services employees gathered inside the grounds of the Poynton Building. Members of the public also started to gather outside the gates eager to see what all the commotion was about. At 15:00, correctional services told media outside the building that Pistorius had left through a back entrance. Earlier yesterday, the High Court in Pretoria granted Pistorius R10,000 bail. Deputy Judge President Aubrey Ledwaba said Pistorius must be electronically monitored.
Pistorius will only be allowed to travel within a radius of 20 kilometres around his uncle’s Waterkloof home, where he was previously serving under correctional supervision for his original sentence of culpable homicide. He will be allowed to leave the home between 07:00 and 12:00, and will need written permission from the investigating officer to leave the house outside of those hours.
Pistorius’ lawyer Barry Roux told Ledwaba that an application for leave to appeal would be brought to the Constitutional Court, and if that was unsuccessful he would return to the high court for sentencing. The case was postponed to April 18.
Pistorius’s culpable homicide conviction was overturned for a stronger conviction of murder by the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) last week in Bloemfontein. He faces a minimum of 15 years for the murder, unless he provides substantial and compelling reasons to the high court to deviate from that.
The SCA’s ruling came almost three years after Pistorius shot and killed Reeva Steenkamp, later stating he mistook her for an intruder. He fired four shots into the door of a toilet cubicle in his Pretoria home on Valentine’s Day in 2013. He served one sixth of his five-year sentence in prison and was released in October to serve the remainder under correctional supervision.— News24.
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