Sport: Oscar Pistorius Cries As He His Convicted Of Murder

Olympic athlete Oscar Pistorius has been found guilty of murder after a South African appeals court overturned an earlier manslaughter verdict. Pistorius killed his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp in February 2013 after shooting four times through a locked toilet door.

Pistorius who is currently under house arrest after spending one year of his original five-year sentence in jail would now have to return to court to be re-sentenced, for murder as the South Africa's Supreme Court of Appeal ruled that the lower court did not correctly apply the rule of dolus eventualis - whether Pistorius knew that a death would be a likely result of his actions.

The panel of appeal judges described the case as “a human tragedy of Shakespearean proportions” in their written judgement. Reading the unanimous ruling reached by the five judges, Justice Eric Leach said that having armed himself with a high-calibre weapon, Pistorius must have foreseen that whoever was behind the door might die, especially given his firearms training. “As a matter of common sense at the time the fatal shots were fired, the possibility of the death of the person behind the door was clearly an obvious result and in firing not one but four shots, such a result became even more likely” the judge said. Pistorius always maintained that he believed there was an intruder in the house but the judge said that the identity of the person behind the door was “irrelevant to his guilt” as justice Leach compared it to someone setting off a bomb in a public place not knowing who the victims might be.

South African law does not make provision for someone to be placed under house arrest for more than five years, so Pistorius will be going back to prison just less than two months after he was placed under house arrest. The date for his sentence hasn’t been fixed yet but it will be next year. The minimum sentence for murder is 15 years, but the judge does have the discretion to lower it.  Pistorius can challenge the ruling in the constitutional court but only if his lawyers can argue that his constitutional rights have been violated but his family gave a brief response, saying lawyers are studying the finding who will advise them on “options going forward”.

Pistorius, a six-time Paralympics gold medalist whose legs were amputated below the knee as a baby, made history by becoming the first amputee sprinter to compete at the Olympics, in 2012, running on prosthetic “blades”.