Chase Your Shadow (46 page)

The second witness Roux called was a social worker at the Department of Correctional Services – the prisons department – called Joel Maringa. Maringa was, like Nel, an employee of the state. He had studied Pistorius’s case, he said, and had written up a report in which he argued that Pistorius should not spend one day in jail. Maringa’s recommendation was that Pistorius, a first-time offender, should be placed under house arrest – or ‘correctional supervision’, as Maringa described it – for three years. Maringa recommended that Pistorius should be required to perform sixteen hours of community work each month, but that he should be free to return to training and even to resume his participation in athletics competitions. This last suggestion raised some eyebrows in the courtroom. Barry Steenkamp, who had been listening intently, leaning forward with his arms on the back of the bench in front of him, looked dumbfounded. He and his wife sat with their jaws clenched as Maringa explained his reasoning: ‘Not only retribution is to be considered. We are also looking at reforming the accused.’

When Nel’s turn came to cross-examine Maringa, he gave voice to what were clearly the Steenkamps’ feelings, describing the social worker’s recommendations for sentence as ‘shockingly inappropriate’. To the distress of Barry Roux, it soon turned out that Maringa had prepared himself poorly for his appearance in court. Although he said in answer to a question from Nel that he had read the trial judgment, he did not seem to have understood it. Maringa’s interpretation of the judgment was that Pistorius’s frightened reaction to the noise he had heard behind the toilet door had been ‘understandable’, which was not what Judge Masipa had said. Worse still, Maringa had read her words to mean that he had not intended to fire his gun.
Pressed by Nel, Maringa was insistent. ‘The accused had not intended to shoot.’

This, Nel informed him, was plain wrong. ‘How,’ Nel asked Maringa, ‘can you base your report on a misreading of the judgment?’ Maringa mumbled that he had not misread the judgment, but – as even the Pistorius family had to agree – this time Nel was right. Maringa handed Nel another gift when he argued that Pistorius’s life should not be ‘destroyed’. Nel shot back that the Steenkamp family’s lives had been destroyed. Should he not take that into account, too?

When Nel had finished with Maringa, Roux wisely let pass the opportunity to re-examine him.

The next witness Roux called was Peet van Zyl, Pistorius’s agent. The service Van Zyl was called on to perform for his client now was to portray him as a philanthropically minded individual, who had it in him still to do good for the unfortunate of the earth. Prompted by Roux, Van Zyl listed a multitude of charities in South Africa and abroad – Unicef, the United Nations children’s organization, for example – to which Pistorius had dedicated his time free of charge. Van Zyl spoke of his plans, cut short after February 2013, to set up his own charitable foundation and to work with the World Food Programme, as well as with war veterans who had lost limbs in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was not, however, immediately clear what impact Pistorius’s good works would have on Judge Masipa. More relevant to the question at issue was the evidence presented on the second day of the hearing by the defense’s fourth and final witness, Annette Vergeer.

Vergeer was a probation officer with twenty-eight years’ experience, who worked both privately and for the state. She handled twenty-five cases of convicted criminals each month. Commissioned by the defense team, she had prepared a long report on the punishment she believed would best fit Pistorius’s crime. Roux asked her to read it.

Unlike Joel Maringa, Vergeer had followed the trial attentively, and in compiling her report had even consulted with Gerrie Nel, who had told her that Pistorius’s disability should not be used as an excuse and that he should be sent to jail. Vergeer disagreed. She noted in her report that Pistorius felt remorse and guilt, that he endured depression and had been ‘publicly humiliated’ during the trial.

Vergeer proceeded to paint a portrait of the typical South African prison. ‘The facilities of prison will not cater to his physical or psychological needs,’ she said – which turned out to be an understatement in the light of the overcrowding, gang violence, widespread disease and sexual abuse that she described as characteristic of prison conditions. Besides, she claimed, prison offered no facilities for disabled people.

It would be extremely difficult, she said, for Pistorius to walk on his stumps on the slippery cement floors of a prison. There were no baths and the showers had no rails for him to hold onto. He would be unable to protect himself from attack in prison and would be vulnerable to sexual assault in an environment where HIV/AIDS was prevalent.

‘He would have to survive in very difficult circumstances, made more difficult by his disability and anxiety,’ Vergeer said. ‘The impact of imprisonment would be devastating. To be in prison would break the accused even further. It would be excessive punishment.’

Given that, additionally, Pistorius possessed the skills to be a productive member of society and was in a position to help people with disabilities, Vergeer recommended, as Joel Maringa had done, that house arrest would be the most appropriate punishment. ‘He should be brought back into society,’ she declared.

That was Vergeer’s message to the judge. But in the course of her testimony she let slip a startling detail, hitherto unknown to the
public, concerning a deal struck between Pistorius and the Steenkamp family. Under questioning by Roux, she revealed that Pistorius had been paying the Steenkamps 6,000 rand (US$550) per month since the death of their daughter. The announcement of the deal caused discomfort to Barry and June Steenkamp, who were seen shifting uneasily in their seats. Roux did not dwell on the matter, but Nel did when his turn came to cross-examine Vergeer. He had some news of his own concerning dealings between Pistorius and the Steenkamps. Shifting attention away from the fact that the 6,000 rand payments had indeed been made – every month between March 2013 and September 2014, as it turned out – Nel revealed that Pistorius had offered the Steenkamp parents a lump-sum compensation payment of 375,000 rand (US$34,000), which would have come from the proceeds of the sale of a car he owned. Nel informed the court that June and Barry Steenkamp had rejected the lump-sum offer, dismissing it as ‘blood money’.

Those two words duly made it into the headlines of the news media the world over, prompting a number of journalists to ask whether the secret 6,000 rand the Steenkamps had uncomplainingly accepted from Pistorius over a period of twenty months might be described as ‘blood money’, too? As if anticipating the question, Nel announced in court that the Steenkamps had taken the decision to repay Pistorius the monthly sums he had given them ‘in full, every cent’. He also said, after consulting with the Steenkamp parents and their lawyer, Advocate Dup de Bruyn, that they had resolved not to pursue a civil case they had initiated against Pistorius in 2013. In short, the Steenkamps sought no more financial compensation from Pistorius and intended, rather, to repay the total of 120,000 rand (US$11,000) they had already received from him.

As late as November 2013 De Bruyn had been telling reporters
seeking to interview the Steenkamps that the couple were ‘indigent’ and would only talk in exchange for cash. When De Bruyn spoke to reporters now, outside the courtroom, he said that the Steenkamps had reached a point where they were ‘reasonably comfortable’. The reporters, who knew that the Steenkamps had made more money than they ever had before in their lives thanks to interviews sold to the news media, disingenuously asked De Bruyn how they had achieved these new levels of comfort. To which he curtly replied, ‘I have done deals for them.’

Whether the ‘blood money’ story would remain a media sideshow or would be taken into Judge Masipa’s calculations on sentencing was not apparent. Of more urgent importance to Nel in his cross-examination of Vergeer was to address her core contention that Pistorius would be neither safe nor adequately cared for in prison. Nel thus returned to a theme familiar since the trial’s beginning, endeavoring to portray Pistorius as he had depicted himself before he shot Reeva, as the near-mythical Blade Runner rather than an insecure, limbless man plagued by fears of nocturnal attack. Nel’s line of argument was that Pistorius would be perfectly capable of looking after himself in prison – which, besides, was not nearly as dark and dangerous a hell-hole as Vergeer had made it out to be. Describing the house-arrest recommendation once more as ‘shockingly inappropriate’, Nel proceeded to fluster Vergeer by showing that a number of the views on prison conditions set out in her report had their source not in her own experience but in texts of dubious or biased provenance which she had obtained from the internet. But Vergeer did not shift from her position that prison would represent an excessive punishment for Pistorius. Sentence should be determined not only on Pistorius’s actions on the night of Reeva’s killing, she said, but ‘on the totality’ of his life and character.

That, in a nutshell, was the point that Roux was seeking to get across to Judge Masipa – and that Nel was seeking to exclude from her calculations.

Vergeer left the stand at noon on the third day of the hearing, concluding the defense’s case for mitigation of sentence. Up first for the prosecution after the lunch break was Kim Martin, a first cousin of Reeva Steenkamp’s. Martin was twelve years older than Reeva and had been close to her from her early childhood to her death. Martin said she had received the blessing of both Barry and June Steenkamp to testify in court. Neither of the two parents had felt they were up to the ordeal of appearing themselves – ‘Uncle Barry told me he’d lose it,’ Martin said – and had effectively left it to her to act as the family’s spokesperson. It would be the first time since the trial began that Nel would opt for Barry Roux’s tactic of seeking to soften the judge’s heart.

Martin, led by Nel, described Reeva as a kind, considerate person, whose parents had always battled financially but had managed, through hard work, to obtain the bursary she needed to pay for her law studies at Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth. She mentioned what she described as the ‘emotionally abusive’ relationship Reeva had had with her first serious boyfriend, the jockey Wayne Agrella. Martin intimated, too, that there had been problems in Reeva’s relationship with Pistorius.

She said she had met Pistorius once, over breakfast with Reeva in Cape Town on January 2, 2013. Martin’s teenage daughter was also at the breakfast. Noting in passing that Reeva called him ‘Oz’, Martin said Pistorius had come across as shy at first, but after watching him talking to her young daughter about boarding school she had formed the opinion that he was ‘a very nice person’. But then Pistorius walked away from the table to take a phone call. Martin seized the
opportunity to ask Reeva if she was happy in the relationship. In reply, Martin said, ‘She pulled up her shoulders and said, “Yes, but we need to talk . . .”’

Martin said she never got a chance to find out what, if anything, was wrong.

That particular piece of testimony was unlikely to have any more impact on Judge Masipa’s thinking than the earlier WhatsApp messages that the prosecution had gone to such lengths to provide as evidence of troubled relations between Reeva and Pistorius. Far more dramatic and emotionally compelling was Martin’s description of her family’s response to the news of the shooting on Valentine’s Day morning, 2013.

Weeping, Martin recalled the moment. ‘Everyone was running around screaming and shouting . . . We were all asking “Why? Why? Why Reeva?”’ In the courtroom June Steenkamp looked pointedly across at Pistorius. He was weeping, too.

Martin said she went to Port Elizabeth from Cape Town, where she lived, to see Uncle Barry and Aunt June. ‘Aunt June was very medicated, but she was hysterical. Uncle Barry was in a corner, crying, crying. Reeva was everything to them.’

Aimée wiped a tear from her eye as Martin continued with her testimony, leaving it to the court to see that it had been not only Pistorius who had sought psychological assistance in the aftermath of the killing. Martin said that she herself had gone for trauma counseling, and her children, who, she said, had adored Reeva, had also been in therapy.

With half an hour of scheduled proceedings remaining on the third day of the hearing, Nel asked for an adjournment, saying he had to consult with Martin regarding the last part of her testimony. Judge Masipa, clearly impatient to bring the long trial to an end, grudgingly
gave her approval and the next morning, October 16, at 9.30 a.m. Martin resumed the stand. But before Nel began questioning her there was another matter he wished to attend to. Turning to face the judge, with a smile on his face and with a graciousness he had rarely displayed in court hitherto, he said, ‘Just before we start, I am honored to be in a position to offer you congratulations on your birthday. We will do our best to make your day as enjoyable as possible.’

Enjoyment would not turn out to be high on the day’s agenda, but Judge Masipa beamed back at Nel and thanked him very much. The public in the courtroom responded to the news – she had turned sixty-seven – with a spontaneous burst of applause. Masipa might have made enemies outside the courtroom, but among those who had followed the trial inside from start to finish the consensus was that she had acquitted herself with elegance, dignity and due gravity. The applause, one sensed, was as much in tribute to the calm authority she had exercised over the court, as for her birthday.

The remaining part of Martin’s testimony consisted of her – and, by implication, the rest of her family’s – position on the sentence Pistorius should receive. It was the most important thing she would say on the witness stand, as it was sure to carry weight with the judge.

First, Nel asked Martin what her response had been to the apology Pistorius had made to the Steenkamp family upon first taking the witness stand six months earlier. Martin’s response was straightforward and unequivocal. ‘I did not feel it was genuine,’ she said.