ROUX THE DAY
Barry becomes an internet hit
OSCAR Pistorius’s legal team have launched an all-out offensive against the state, and the immediate target of their offensive is police bungling.
At the heart of the attack are conflicting police statements, shoddy forensics and an allegation that police officers at the scene of the crime committed the cardinal sin of tampering with evidence.
In the second week of the trial, defence advocate Barry Roux ripped into several key aspects of the case against Pistorius. He stopped just short of bluntly accusing the police of tampering with evidence and engineering their case against him.
Pistorius is on trial for the murder of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, whom he shot dead on Valentine’s Day last year.
The athlete claims he mistook her for a burglar.
In his plea explanation read into the court record on the first day of the trial, Pistorius claimed that the state had “embarked on a strategy to rely on unsubstantiated allegations”. He accused it of using evidence “designed to falsely incriminate me on an allegation of premeditated murder”.
Roux launched vicious attacks on two key state witnesses: forensic expert Colonel Johannes Vermeulen and former Boschkop station commander Schoombie van Rensburg, who had been a colonel at the time of the killing.
Vermeulen conducted tests on the toilet cubicle door through which Pistorius fired the shots that killed Steenkamp. The door featured prominently in the courtroom this week as a mockup of the cubicle was set up.
Vermeulen said his findings indicated that Pistorius was on his stumps when he broke down the door with a cricket bat after firing the shots.
He said that, judging from the marks on the door, it would have been “unnatural” for Pistorius to have delivered such blows had he been on his legs. This was disputed by the defence, who said Pistorius had put on his prosthetic legs by then.
Roux hammered Vermeulen on why he had not checked a mark on the door he said was caused when the Blade Runner tried to kick it open. He accused Vermeulen of ignoring the athlete’s own version of how he had tried and failed to kick open the door.
The police also came under fire when Roux pointed out that splinters from the door were ignored when it was reassem-
Van Rensburg kept the door, wrapped in a body bag, in his office for nearly two weeks
bled. Although Vermeulen claimed not to have known about the splinters, they were clearly visible on a police photograph.
The relentless attack on the police continued when Van Rensburg took the stand. The former senior cop, who resigned from the police late last year, testified that he was the first police officer on the scene. He said the first police officers to go upstairs to the bathroom were him and investigating officer
A ballistics expert picked up Pistorius’s 9mm pistol without wearing gloves
Hilton Botha, now retired.
After detailing what he had seen, Roux produced two statements from other officers.
They contradicted Van Rensburg’s version that he and Botha were the first on the scene.
Asked to explain how these statements contained accurate details about what the scene looked like, Van Rensburg replied with a sarcastic “That’s amazing”. He stuck to his story that he and Botha were the first officers to venture upstairs to the bathroom scene.
Roux accused the state of using Van Rensburg as a substitute for Botha, the latter having come under fire over his handling of the scene. When Roux asked the state whether it would call Botha, prosecutor Gerrie Nel said: “We don’t know yet.”
Van Rensburg kept the door, wrapped in a body bag, in his office for nearly two weeks. He said this was because he had no space in the evidence store room and he felt it would be safer in his office, lying in front of his desk.
Two watches were stolen from Pistorius’s house and Van Rensburg had to ask for all police officers on the scene to be body-searched, to no avail;
In some crime scene photos, items in the main bedroom had been moved around, such as Steenkamp’s flip-flops, despite Van Rensburg saying no one had interfered with the scene; and,
A ballistics expert picked up Pistorius’s 9mm pistol without wearing gloves and simply said “sorry” when asked what he was doing.
Earlier in the week, testimony from Saayman said Steenkamp had suffered four gunshot injuries. The only part of his testimony that was questioned was his evidence that Steenkamp “probably” ate about two hours before her death. This was at odds with Pistorius’s version — he said they had gone to bed at 10pm.
Roux questioned the scientific methods used to determine the time between a last meal and death. Saayman conceded it was not an exact science.