Equal and colour-blind?

SENTENCING Oscar Pistorius to five years’ imprisonment for manslaughter, Judge Thokozile Masipa struggled to achieve the near-impossible: appeasing both sides in the long, heart-rending trial. The mother of Reeva Steenkamp, Mr Pistorius’s girlfriend who was shot dead by him at his home on Valentine’s Day last year, said she felt that justice had not been done. However, Mr Pistorius’s uncle said that the sportsman, the first double-amputee sprinter to compete in the Olympic games, had accepted the sentence and would “embrace this opportunity to pay back to society”.

But the reaction of ordinary South Africans, especially among the black majority, has been less measured. Many think the sentence too light. Mr Pistorius could spend as little as ten months behind bars before being released to house arrest. Public confidence in the trial and the justice of the verdict has fallen.

When the trial began seven months ago, there was much pride in the sight of Ms Masipa, a former crime reporter and social worker, sagely holding court over a white defendant and mainly white lawyers. Now many South Africans think she has let a wealthy, white celebrity get off lightly. Legal experts note that a judge can choose from a range of sentences for manslaughter, known in South Africa as culpable homicide. Ms Masipa, who emphasised justice rather than vengeance in her reasoning, handed Mr Pistorius a sentence that was fairly standard in such cases.

But it was her decision to deem the crime manslaughter, rather than murder, that has proved controversial. In her judgment Ms Masipa said that Mr Pistorius had acted with gross negligence when he fired four shots through a lavatory door, killing Ms Steenkamp. But she accepted that he had genuinely mistaken his girlfriend for an intruder. The ruling African National Congress’s Women’s League, however, responded with a more common view. “We hold that regardless of who Mr Pistorius believed to be behind the bathroom door that fateful night, he shot to kill—and therefore a murder did occur.”

Black South Africans, about 80% of the population, are a lot more likely than whites to be both victims and perpetrators of crime. “It would be a sad day for this country if an impression was created that there is one law for the poor and disadvantaged and another for the rich and famous,” Ms Masipa told the court.

But Mr Pistorius, unlike most South Africans, could afford to hire the best lawyers and mount the best defence possible. City Press, a weekly, estimated his legal costs just for the days when the trial was in progress at 3.7m rand ($335,000). “It is a question of class and ability to access legal resources, and that is not a uniquely South African thing,” says Frans Cronje of the South African Institute of Race Relations. He asks if Mr Pistorius were a poor black man who had shot his girlfriend in a township in similar circumstances, would he not have been convicted of murder and handed a long sentence behind bars after a cursory investigation?