South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal grilled Oscar Pistorius’ attorney and a prosecutor on Tuesday as it weighed whether to convict him of murder for killing his girlfriend, uphold a lower court’s manslaughter conviction or order a retrial.
Prosecutors say the North Gauteng High Court erred in convicting Pistorius of the lesser charge, and that the double-amputee Olympian should have known that someone could be killed when he fired four times into a locked toilet cubicle in his home.
“If you look at the photographs, there’s room behind there for a toilet bowl and a person and just about nothing else,” Justice lorimer leach said to defense lawyer Barry Roux. “There’s nowhere to hide. It would be a miracle if you didn’t shoot someone.”
The five judges questioned prosecutor Gerrie Nel and Roux for about three hours in the court in Bloemfontein with Steenkamp’s mother June Steenkamp in attendance.