Authors: Mandy Wiener
One Tragic Night (39 page)
No one knew with any certainty how things were going to roll. The media were anxious; standing in knots outside the entrance, photographers speculated
about whether Oscar would get special treatment and be brought into the courthouse through a back entrance, avoiding their glare. Security had been ramped up and anyone wanting access to the courtroom, including the families of the accused and the deceased, was required to be accredited, with tags of varying colours hanging on lanyards.
What would Oscar look like? Would he still have the beard he was spotted sporting over the past few months? Who would he arrive with and how?
There was also a concern that the media circus could turn out to be nothing but a damp squib and the trial would not run at all. Weekend media reports had suggested that the defence could bring an application for a postponement, requesting further particulars from the prosecution. The state's legal team insisted it was prepared and ready to run. It was all up to the defence.
The gauntlet of reporters and public jammed the main entrance to the large brick building, standing inside the tall wrought-iron gates, in front of the imposing rust-coloured pillars. Beyond the heavy wooden doors and the glass arch, those journalists who had accreditation for the main courtroom (GD) loitered on the black-and-beige chessboard tiles, their bags filled with laptops, cables and recording equipment. Others filled the hard wooden benches, below posters advertising free legal services.
Investigating officer Captain Mike van Aardt marched his way through the crowd, holding a black A4 notepad binder. Trailing behind him was the national head of detectives, General Vineshkumar Moonoo. Their special red tags allowed them immediate access past the security guards, clad in luminous bibs, manning the doors.
Outside photographers waited in the rain at the side entrance to the courthouse, where Oscar's brother and sister had entered a short while earlier. They anticipated that he would follow suit and use the same door. But they were wrong; surrounded by a bevy of âbodyguards', the husbands of his uncle Arnold's four daughters, Oscar walked into the building through the main entrance. For the duration of the trial, these same âbodyguards' â Dieter Kruger, Reinecke Janse van Rensburg, Johan van Wyk and Johan Visagie â would accompany the runner each time he walked in and out of the building, escorting him to a waiting Land Rover or down the road to his lawyers' chambers or to the Tribeca restaurant for a quick meal.
As the Blade Runner walked in an onlooker shouted, âIt's Oscar!' and the photographers turned around and saw his entourage enter. The athlete passed through the security checkpoint and metal detectors before turning back and shaking his head at those wielding their cameras. One of the âbodyguards'
chuckled and a photographer mumbled, âI can't believe he duped us all. We were waiting like idiots in the rain.'
A court orderly escorted Oscar into courtroom GD, guiding him to his seat in the dock. He passed Reeva's mother, June Steenkamp, but turned his face away and avoided eye contact. The officer swung open the little wooden door and showed Oscar in. He turned and waved to his relatives in the public gallery before taking his seat.
The room is about 20 metres wide, with six rows of seats in the public gallery. For the case of
The State
vs
OLC Pistorius
, the first row was reserved for family â it was split down the middle, the right side for Reeva's relatives and the left for Oscar's. Two rows behind the family were allocated to the media and the remainder for the public.
On every day of the trial, Oscar was supported by members of his tight-knit and extremely protective family, led by the wealthy, confident and erudite Uncle Arnold, and including his brother and sister, his other two uncles and their wives, as well as his various aunts and cousins.
June Steenkamp sat just a few arms' lengths away from Oscar's family, supported by members of the ANC Women's League in their green uniforms, a friend, her cousin Kim Martin or the couple's advocate Dup de Bruyn SC. June watched as detailed evidence of her daughter's death was matter-of-factly and unemotionally presented to the court and she responded stoically, rarely shedding a tear.
Oscar only greeted June once, the gesture coming, perhaps coincidentally, after she had complained in a magazine interview about his careful avoidance of any kind of eye contact with her.
Gina Myers, her sister Kim and their mother Desi also regularly occupied the front row, glamorously dressed in funereal black with their sunglasses on standby.
Court GD is one of only four courtrooms on the ground floor of the High Court and is the furthest room to the right. It's the closest one to the main exit and side entrance and it is for this reason that it usually hosts the most high-profile cases and those that require the most intense security measures. Logistically, it is the easiest courtroom to isolate and officers can bring accused into the room securely. For a decade, it was used for the infamous Boeremag treason trial in which a group of white supremacists stood trial for ten years under high security, accused of trying to overthrow the African National Congress-led government in 2002, and were convicted in late 2013.
Court staff had prepared the room for the world's spotlight. The wooden
benches were polished to a high sheen and the fluorescent lights on the ceiling cascaded light down the wooden wall panels. The two high-back burgundy leather chairs, with wooden embellishments, at the head of the room, awaiting the two assessors, were also gleaming. Between them, a smaller high-back black chair was positioned, its more supportive structure preferred by the slightly built Judge Thokozile Masipa. To the right of the chairs stood the drooping national flag.
Eight flat-screen monitors had been set up in the courtroom, their yellow wallpaper announcing the details of the case in green and white text:
Gauteng North High Court
Case Number CC 113/13
Boschkop Cas 110/02/2013
A coat of arms sat at the top of the screen, the star of the police logo on the bottom left and the lady justice emblem of the National Prosecuting Authority on the bottom right, with a South African flag in the middle. There was a screen for the judge, another for the accused, two on either end of the room for the media and the public and two on both sides for the legal teams.
A large air-conditioning unit on a swivel stand had been wheeled into the room for the trial and three cameras on tripods had been set up to broadcast proceedings to the âoverflow' courtroom next door, which accommodated additional journalists and curious members of the public. Over time that room began to resemble a movie theatre, with the lights dimmed and viewers resting their feet up on the seats in front of them, exclaiming their reactions at the big screen and snacking away, much to the dismay of the security guards trying to keep some kind of order.
Smaller cameras had also been fitted in the main courtroom for the live televised broadcast of the trial. This was a first in South African legal history. Following an application by several media houses a week before the trial commenced, Judge President Dunstan Mlambo granted permission for the hi-tech cameras to be installed.
Mlambo stated that the media houses were allowed to broadcast audiovisual images of sections of the trial, including evidence of all state experts and the evidence of police and former police officers about the crime scene. Closing arguments by the state and defence legal teams, delivery of the judgment or sentencing, if applicable, could also be broadcast.
Although Oscar's legal team had opposed the application, arguing it would
result in an unfair trial, in his ruling Mlambo said, âIt is ⦠in the public interest that, within allowance limits, the goings on during the trial be covered ⦠to ensure a greater number of people in the community who are unable to attend the proceedings are able to follow wherever they may be.'
Between the public gallery and the burgundy chairs of the judicial officers is the arena in which the action would take place. In front of the public gallery is the stairwell to the holding cells below, then the dock for the accused, and in front the seats for the legal teams alongside their lecterns. The defence sat to the left: Kenny Oldwadge closest to the middle and Barry Roux next to him. Behind them were attorney Brian Webber and his two candidate attorneys, Roxanne Adams and Rohan Kruger. Ballistics expert Wollie Wolmarans sat alongside them.
To the right was Advocate Gerrie Nel, his junior Andrea Johnson, Investigating Officer Mike van Aardt and an empty chair for whichever expert witness Nel needed to consult with during evidence. In a string in the row behind them sat the police's investigative team: Gerhard Vermeulen, Chris Mangena, Gerhard Labuschagne, Ian van der Nest, Bennie van Staden and Francois Moller. For the brief period when Labuschagne was away attending a conference, his underling Major Bronwyn Stollarz took his place. As the trial progressed, investigator Andrew Leask, who had spent years working with Nel and Johnson, joined this row.
Facing the legal teams, in the seats below the judge's platform, sat her registrar Suzette Naudé, the official court stenographer Ria Davel in front of her machine, and the private transcriber, Barry Kagan, hired by the defence legal team.
As Oscar waited for the judge and her two assessors to enter the courtroom, he spoke with his lawyers. He leaned in as Roux motioned towards him, and stood in a huddle whispering, their arms crossed over their bodies. Using his left hand Oscar tapped Roux three times on his right forearm, ending the conversation. Oscar turned away and again took up his position as the orderly instructed the room to rise.
With her red-and-white robe, neatly braided hair, angular features and round glasses, Judge Thokozile Matilda Masipa is the image of quiet authority, despite her occasionally fragile appearance when she has difficulty walking and needs to be supported by an orderly. Masipa, who qualified as a lawyer in her forties, spent 15 years on the bench before being routinely allocated
The State
vs
OLC Pistorius.
Prior to studying law, she was a social worker and journalist.
Masipa was born in 1947 in the Orlando East neighbourhood of Soweto. It was the year before the National Party came to power and the influence of its apartheid policy played a significant role in her life and, by implication, on her outlook.
She was one of ten siblings, five of whom died at a young age, leaving her as the eldest of the five surviving brothers and sisters. One of her deceased brothers was stabbed to death by unknown perpetrators when he was just 21 years old. Her father was a travelling salesman who later worked as a chauffeur and her mother was a teacher by training.
In a profile on her life featured in the 2007 documentary
Courting Justice
, directed by Jane Thandi Lipman and produced by Ruth Cowan, Masipa recalled what her upbringing was like:
When we had visitors, I had to make a makeshift bed under the table and cover it with curtains. My dad made [our home] look like a threeroomed house â he built a partition between the bigger room ⦠They slept in the bedroom, but the bigger room was a dining room and a kitchen. So I would sleep in the kitchen if visitors were around. When there were no visitors, I would sleep in the dining room.
When we grew up, Orlando East was an area, a very poor area, where people really did not have recreational facilities. A lot of young children didn't have role models, because all they saw at weekends was where people were getting drunk and people getting stabbed, because crime was rife even then â it's just that now it's different, people use firearms. But then people used to stab one another; they would go to a shebeen, get drunk and then start fighting and then stabbings would go on. So young children saw that happening and most of them didn't really go to school with an aim that they want to do something, they just went to school because someone said, âYou have to go to school.' They didn't have plans, they didn't say, âThis is what I want to be,' because they just didn't have any role models. That is why it means a lot for me that I was able to be something.
Masipa went to school at St John Berchmans in Soweto, run by Roman Catholic nuns, until Standard 5 (Grade 7). In the documentary, she recalled:
The classrooms were very crowded, and because it's a school not for privileged children, like any other school in the township, you find that those kinds of problems â the schools are crowded, some of the teachers are not really well-qualified. So it was really, it just shows that if you're lucky enough to just, to hold on and persevere, you become something â¦
When I grew up, in the '50s, there was this legalisation of apartheid; I can remember that quite well. We were very young, but very perceptive, because before the apartheid era, we used to at school, for example, we used to learn through the English medium, but suddenly when Bantu Education was introduced, we were taught things like arithmetic. We started finding ourselves with things called isibalo, and we never knew why it was that then we had to be taught in, you know, in Zulu or Sotho. And I also remember the, you know, teachers starting to resign from schools, so we had that problem as well. And when [then Prime Minister] Strydom died [in 1958] â I can remember, it's quite bizarre, but I can remember now that people were dancing in the street, being happy that he was, he was gone.
She spent one year at school in Natal and three more at St Theresa's Girls High School in Manzini. Masipa travelled by bus or taxi between her parents' home near Johannesburg and her school in Swaziland. Despite being just a teenager,
Masipa was interrogated during her attempts to reach Swaziland, a popular exit route for freedom fighters opposing apartheid at the time. Authorities wanted to know if she was a threat with any kind of political association. She would have returned to Swaziland for her two final years of schooling, but she broke her shoulder in a bus accident and was forced to finish her education in Alexandra township in 1966.