Oscar Pistorius was granted parole on Friday after spending more than eight years in prison. Image: The Mirror.
South African former Paralympic champion Oscar Pistorius will soon be a free man after being granted parole by the Correctional Supervision and Parole Board on Friday, 24 November 2023. According to a statement by the Department of Correctional Services (DCS), he will be released from prison on the 5th of January next year.
Pistorius, who shot and killed his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp on Valentine’s Day in 2013 and claimed that he thought she was an intruder, was initially incarcerated in October 2014 after being found guilty of culpable homicide and sentenced to five years in prison. In October 2015, he was released into house arrest. However, following the prosecution’s appeals for a harsher sentence, his conviction was upgraded to murder and his sentence increased to 6 years, and later to 13 years and 5 months. He returned to prison in July 2016 and has been behind bars since then. Upon his release, he will have served a total of just over 9 years of his sentence, including the period from October 2015 to July 2016, during which he was under house arrest.
Reeva’s mother June Steenkamp stated in an impact statement that was read at the parole hearing that she was not convinced that the blade runner had been rehabilitated and that he was telling the truth in his claim that he thought her daughter was a burglar. However, she did not oppose his parole.
Reeva’s father Barry died in September this year after suffering a stroke. In her statement, June said, “My dear Barry left this world utterly devastated by the thought that he had failed to protect his daughter and therefore in his role as a father, as he perceived it. The only hope he had left, was that Oscar would find it in himself to eventually tell the full truth. It is my hope that parole decisions treat the safety of women as the most important consideration by exercising their power judiciously.”
