Oscar Pistorius will face the high court in Pretoria again on Monday, but his sentencing for the murder of Reeva Steenkamp is expected to be postponed.
The former Paralympian’s culpable homicide conviction was overturned by South Africa’s supreme court in December 2015, when appeal judges instead found him guilty of murder.
A provisional date of 18 April was set for the original trial judge, Thokozile Masipa, to hand down a fresh sentence on the more serious charge. But the office of the chief justice said the hearing on Monday would see that date formally pushed back to 13 June.
The athlete, who is currently living at his uncle’s home in Pretoria, is likely to remain on bail until then.
Pistorius had always denied intentionally killing Steenkamp, his girlfriend, in his Pretoria home in the early hours of 14 February 2013. He insisted throughout his lengthy trial that he had mistaken her for an intruder, shooting four times through a locked toilet cubicle door, killing her instantly.
At his original trial, Masipa accepted this version of events, ruling that there was no evidence that Pistorius had wanted to kill Steenkamp, but that his actions had been negligent, reports The Guardian.
But the supreme court found that Masipa had wrongly applied the legal principle of dolus eventualis, which hinges on whether an accused should have foreseen the outcome of his actions. Pistorius “must have foreseen” that firing into the door could cause the death of whoever was behind it, the judges said.
Describing Steenkamp’s death as “a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions”, the judges said: “The accused ought to have been found guilty of murder.”
An attempt by Pistorius’ legal team to have that finding thrown out by the constitutional court, South Africa’s highest judicial authority, was denied in March and he has no further avenues of appeal on the conviction.
