Chase Your Shadow

by John Carlin

  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 alway
s 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.

  What, Nel asked her next, were her feelings towards the accused now?

  ‘I am very fearful of the accused,’ Martin replied. ‘I have tried very hard to put him out of my mind and do not mention his name in my house. I don’t want to expend energy thinking about him.’

  And what, Nel wanted to know, did Martin consider to be a fitting punishment for Pistorius?

  ‘I really believe Mr Pistorius needs to pay for what he has done,’ she replied. ‘My family are not people who are seeking revenge. We just feel that to shoot someone behind a door who is unarmed and is harmless needs sufficient punishment. I can say I honestly feel that Mr Pistorius should pay for what he’s done by taking Reeva’s life, for what he has done to my uncle and my aunt and to the rest of my family.’

  Martin added that the sentence Pistorius received should send a message to society that one cannot do what he did and get away with it. As to the suggestion made in court that he should be placed under house arrest instead of being sent to jail, Martin’s position was clear: ‘It would not fit the crime.’

  Roux, alert to the potency of Martin’s testimony, did not keep her long on the witness stand. Cross-examination lasted less than five minutes, the chief purpose of the exercise being to allow Roux the opportunity to put it on record that Pistorius ‘desperately’ wanted an opportunity to apologize privately to the Steenkamps, ‘at whatever time and date’.

  Like much of what was heard in evidence at the sentencing hearing, this gesture was aimed more at public opinion than at the judge. What would not have escaped the judge, however, was that Martin had provided the most emotionally compelling evidence of the hearing.

  The second and final prosecution witness was Zach Modise, the acting national director of the Department of Correctional Services. He began his testimony with what seemed to amount to a propaganda exercise on behalf of the South African prison system. Placed on the stand by Nel to refute Annette Vergeer’s apocalyptic portrayal of conditions in jail, Modise went to the other extreme and painted South African prison life as an experience more akin to a vacation camp. Enthusing about the sports facilities – notably the abundance of gyms – and the quality of hygiene and health care enjoyed by prisoners, as well as the spiritual ministrations offered by visiting psychologists and pastors of the church, Modise said that, contrary to Vergeer’s claims, the Kgosi Mampuru prison in Pretoria where Pistorius would be incarcerated if he were sentenced to jail catered amply for the needs of people with every type of disability, providing baths, showers with rails to hold onto, and single cells.

  Roux, in his cross-examination, did not give Modise an easy ride, pointing to official statistics that showed an increase in torture and violent assaults inside South African prisons over the previous year. Roux, highlighting the well-publicized influence of criminal gangs in prison, mentioned the case of a prisoner at Kgosi Mampuru called Khalil Subjee but known to inmates as ‘the General’. According to press reports, Subjee had made it known that he intended to ‘take out’ Pistorius, Roux told Modise, who said he knew nothing of this. Roux insisted, but Modise continued to plead ignorance, putting himself in an increasingly uncomfortable position.

  If Roux was laying a trap, it worked. So defensive did Modise become under Roux’s questioning that when Roux put it to him that, in the event of his going to jail, Pistorius should receive special treatment, Modise did not disagree. As if accepting that prison was, after all, a dangerous place not well fitted to accommodating disabled inmates, Modise was pushed into declaring that Pistorius should be kept not with the rest of the common criminals but in a hospital wing. Roux, who wanted the judge to hear that loud and clear, reiterated the point. Was the national director of prisons saying, then, that the hospital section would be the appropriate place to incarcerate Pistorius? ‘Yes,’ Modise replied. ‘That would be a fair summary.’

  That was quite a coup by Roux. In the worst of cases his client would find himself in the prison equivalent of the hotel suites Pistorius used to frequent in his days of i
nternational athletics competition.

  When closing arguments began five days into the hearing, on Friday, October 17, however, Roux pressed on with his request that Pistorius should be spared jail and placed under house arrest.

  In an emotional appeal to the judge, Roux recalled that the court had concurred with Pistorius that the shooting of Reeva Steenkamp had not been a conscious act. His client, he said, had already suffered enough, both on account of the remorse he had endured and the unfair public pillorying he had withstood.

  ‘It is our respectful submission,’ Roux said, ‘that never in history before has any accused been denigrated, humiliated and ridiculed on false and irresponsible allegations, to the extent that the actual punishment for the crime would do little to alleviate the ill effects caused by the uninformed in their striving for sensation.’

  Pistorius’s fall from grace had been as abject as it had been spectacular, Roux continued. ‘He was an icon in the eyes of South Africans for what he has achieved. He’s lost everything.’ Everything, Roux said, included ‘the person he loved’, ‘his self-image, self-respect and dignity’, ‘his career’, ‘his reputation’ and ‘all of his money’. ‘There is nothing left of this man,’ Roux said. ‘He’s not only broke, but he’s broken. He hasn’t even the money to pay for legal expenses. He has nothing left.’