Disgraced and jailed Oscar Pistorius has hardly served a year of his far-too-lenient sentence for the 2013 shooting death of girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, and yet he’s eligible for conditional parole this summer.
Steenkamp’s grieving mother finds that idea offensive and believes her slain daughter’s life “is surely worth more than 10 month’s incarceration.”
"All I could think about was her in that toilet and that she couldn't move," June Steenkamp reminded reporters today. “She couldn't get out of the way. She was trapped in there. She was suffering. She was in pain and agony. Her brains all over ... I've had nightmares over that."
She’s right to object -- it was obscene enough that the wealthy South African athlete managed to finagle only a 5-year prison term for the vicious Valentine’s Day killing in which he ridiculously claimed to fear his soon-to-be-ex lover “was an armed intruder.”
But the idea of someone previously known to be so murderously volatile -- and with a history of violence against women -- being released from jail now should be alarming to anyone with a sense of justice and decency.
Pistorius gutlessly gunned down 29-year-old Reeva Steenkamp as she sought refuge from him in a small bathroom in his Pretoria mansion.
Investigators say he emptied a volley of bullets through the locked bathroom door, in a horrific slaying that, according to numerous witnesses, immediately followed a woman’s screams and a night of loud arguing.
The slain model-actress was an outspoken critic of South Africa’s rampant and runaway domestic violence problem, which makes her brutal killing all the more tragic.
In court, legless Pistorius had shamelessly wept and begged for his own life, and even called undue attention to his “stumps” as the reason he supposedly had been so “terrified” he had to shoot and bludgeon his unarmed lover to death.
Prior to that, the defendant had always endeavored to marginalize his peculiar birth defect, even developing racing blades which enabled him not only to run like normal men can, but to set speed records, too.
The novel device, which helped Oscar Pistorius make millions on the track, also earned him the nickname Blade Runner, as well as worldwide admiration for conquering his unusual disability.
It did nothing, however, to tame a truly vile temperament, and, if anything, his celebrity status as an Olympic runner exacerbated that barely-hidden flaw, for which no corrective prosthetic exists.
It’s vital, therefore, that Pistorius serve out his full sentence, as he’s already gotten away with murder, and thus, without even that meager penalty being imposed for taking Steenkamp’s life, will surely kill again.
