Oscar Pistorius Found Guilty of Murder After Appeal

The Blade Runner could go to jail for 15 years. 

More than year after Oscar Pistorius was found guilty of killing his girlfriend by mistake, South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal overturned his manslaughter verdict and convicted the former Olympian of murder. The man they called the Blade Runner faces as much as 15 years in prison.

Last September, Pistorius was found guilty of “culpable homicide,” South Africa’s version of manslaughter, for killing his girlfriend in February 2013.

Pistorius has long maintained that he thought there was an intruder in his house the night he killed  Reeva Steenkamp, a model he’d been dating for three months. Thinking the intruder was hiding the bathroom, Pistorius fired a gun several times though the door. In so doing, Pistorius knew he’d kill whoever was behind the door, Justice Lorimer Eric Leach said in his ruling. That made his crime murder.

From the beginning, prosecutors argued that Pistorius’ intruder story was concocted to cover up his murder of Steenkamp. The models’ mother appeared on NBC’s “Today” and expressed great relief that her daughter’s killer had been convicted of murder. “I feel so proud now that she’s got some respect and she hasn’t lost her life for nothing. She will be remembered and it’s good for all the women in South Africa,” she said. 

Photos by Herman Verwey / Getty Images

Share: 
Tags: