to be seen to take tough action against it.
In the event, the magistrate paid little heed to this appeal, limiting himself to the evidence he had heard. In a two-hour reading of his judgment, he set out the arguments for and against bail, offering no clue as to what his verdict would be right up until the end. The tension was excruciating. Pistorius would not be able to cope with jail, living alongside murderers. Even if they didn’t get to him first, how would he be able to carry on living with the memory of what he had done with no aunt or sister or cousin or grandmother to comfort him?
On the magistrate droned, one moment raising Pistorius’s hopes,dashing them the next. Nair acknowledged the flaws in the police handling of the case but noted also the ‘quite pronounced improbabilities’ of the bail applicant’s account of what had happened. He had a list of difficulties, as he put it, with that version; but neither, on the other hand, was the prosecution’s case watertight. There again, it would be unreasonable to expect the state to have ‘all the pieces of the puzzle now’. As to the possibility of Pistorius jumping bail and fleeing the country, Nair judged it to be limited because of his national and global fame and his physical impairment. Nor did Nair believe he presented ‘a threat to the public’.
Whereupon, he finally declared on February 22, eight days after the shooting, that Pistorius would be granted bail pending payment of 1 million rand (US$100,000) and his handing over his passport and any guns he might own (other than the one with which he had shot the victim, which was in the possession of the police). On meeting these conditions, he would be free to go home – or, as it turned out, to the home of his uncle Arnold. The Pistorius family members embraced each other, then reached out to hug him.
He sobbed with relief, but on the streets of South Africa the magistrate’s decision was greeted with outrage by many. It reeked of preferential treatment – rich boy’s justice. It felt like an insult to the many thousands – 46,000 was the official figure for the whole of South Africa – who lay in filthy jails pending trial, many of them either on charges far more innocuous than his or where the evidence of guilt was substantially less. A case in point, as one newspaper pointed out, was that of a fifty-year-old black paraplegic called Ronnie Fakude, who had spent two years in prison awaiting trial not for murder but for fraud. He continued to wait as the Pistorius bail verdict was delivered, able to move only by dragging himself around a crowded cell on his hands.
South African columnists had a field day. Justice and equality were the legacies Nelson Mandela had bequeathed to the country; the favorable treatment received in a law court by a rich and famous white man had put those principles to the test and found them wanting. Justice in South Africa, as a judge had once said of justice in Britain, was open to all men, like the doors of the Ritz Hotel. Pistorius had found himself the best team of lawyers that money could buy and that, aided and abetted – in a view widely held – by an impressionable magistrate, had won him an undeserved freedom.
Pistorius himself was in no state to dwell on such considerations. For him and his family Barry Roux was the hero of the hour. He had confirmed his reputation as one of the top criminal defense lawyers in South Africa by the meticulous doggedness with which he had successfully pursued what seemed to many of his peers to be an unwinnable cause. But Roux pressed on. He lodged an appeal against the conditions set and, still more surprisingly, won again. A second court lifted the restriction on leaving South Africa and revoked a ban imposed by magistrate Nair on drinking alcohol, deeming it to have been ‘unreasonable and unfair’.
A further victory came when Hilton Botha was removed from the case after it emerged that he had been charged with
In the event, the magistrate paid little heed to this appeal, limiting himself to the evidence he had heard. In a two-hour reading of his judgment, he set out the arguments for and against bail, offering no clue as to what his verdict would be right up until the end. The tension was excruciating. Pistorius would not be able to cope with jail, living alongside murderers. Even if they didn’t get to him first, how would he be able to carry on living with the memory of what he had done with no aunt or sister or cousin or grandmother to comfort him?
On the magistrate droned, one moment raising Pistorius’s hopes,dashing them the next. Nair acknowledged the flaws in the police handling of the case but noted also the ‘quite pronounced improbabilities’ of the bail applicant’s account of what had happened. He had a list of difficulties, as he put it, with that version; but neither, on the other hand, was the prosecution’s case watertight. There again, it would be unreasonable to expect the state to have ‘all the pieces of the puzzle now’. As to the possibility of Pistorius jumping bail and fleeing the country, Nair judged it to be limited because of his national and global fame and his physical impairment. Nor did Nair believe he presented ‘a threat to the public’.
Whereupon, he finally declared on February 22, eight days after the shooting, that Pistorius would be granted bail pending payment of 1 million rand (US$100,000) and his handing over his passport and any guns he might own (other than the one with which he had shot the victim, which was in the possession of the police). On meeting these conditions, he would be free to go home – or, as it turned out, to the home of his uncle Arnold. The Pistorius family members embraced each other, then reached out to hug him.
He sobbed with relief, but on the streets of South Africa the magistrate’s decision was greeted with outrage by many. It reeked of preferential treatment – rich boy’s justice. It felt like an insult to the many thousands – 46,000 was the official figure for the whole of South Africa – who lay in filthy jails pending trial, many of them either on charges far more innocuous than his or where the evidence of guilt was substantially less. A case in point, as one newspaper pointed out, was that of a fifty-year-old black paraplegic called Ronnie Fakude, who had spent two years in prison awaiting trial not for murder but for fraud. He continued to wait as the Pistorius bail verdict was delivered, able to move only by dragging himself around a crowded cell on his hands.
South African columnists had a field day. Justice and equality were the legacies Nelson Mandela had bequeathed to the country; the favorable treatment received in a law court by a rich and famous white man had put those principles to the test and found them wanting. Justice in South Africa, as a judge had once said of justice in Britain, was open to all men, like the doors of the Ritz Hotel. Pistorius had found himself the best team of lawyers that money could buy and that, aided and abetted – in a view widely held – by an impressionable magistrate, had won him an undeserved freedom.
Pistorius himself was in no state to dwell on such considerations. For him and his family Barry Roux was the hero of the hour. He had confirmed his reputation as one of the top criminal defense lawyers in South Africa by the meticulous doggedness with which he had successfully pursued what seemed to many of his peers to be an unwinnable cause. But Roux pressed on. He lodged an appeal against the conditions set and, still more surprisingly, won again. A second court lifted the restriction on leaving South Africa and revoked a ban imposed by magistrate Nair on drinking alcohol, deeming it to have been ‘unreasonable and unfair’.
A further victory came when Hilton Botha was removed from the case after it emerged that he had been charged with
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