OSCAR PISTORIUS FOUND GUILTY OF ‘NEGLIGENT’ MURDER, GRANTS BAIL TILL SENTENCING
12-9-2014 5.25PM IST
Medhaj News: Cleared of murder, the South African judge on Friday found Oscar Pistorius guilty of culpable homicide or negligent killing for the fatal shooting of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. Oscar has been found guilty of culpable homicide, a charge similar to manslaughter, in British legal terminology - but cleared of murder, Judge further said.
Judge Thokozile Masipa said the athlete acted 'negligently' when he fired the bullet and it might be in the 'belief that there was an intruder'.
She said the state had failed to prove he had the 'intention' to kill Reeva Steenkamp on the Valentine's Day last year.
However, Oscar is guilty of culpable homicide and of firing a gun in a Johannesburg restaurant by mistake, Judge added.
The twitter outrage after the verdict is pretty much disturbing. The struggle has taken a black vs white context.
Raymond Suttner, a professor at Rhodes University, said in a blog post that "black" has always been "and continues to be, a code word for criminality in South Africa." Black South Africans counter that many who grew up during apartheid are equally fearful of violence by whites.
According to an analysis by the Pretoria-based Institute of Security Studies, South African homicide victims are disproportionately young, black (or mixed-race) males. Only 1.8% of victims in 2009 were white, even though whites accounted for 9.6% of the population. About 87.5% of homicide victims were black, with blacks accounting for 79% of the population.