“Of course the Pistorius trial is on an entirely different level in that murder is the ultimate crime, a beautiful model – Reeva Steenkamp (pictured) – was killed, the accused is disabled and the athlete, unlike Cronje, is recognisable throughout the world, not only in cricket-playing nations.
Judge Dunstan Mlambo’s decision in February to allow the case to be televised, in spite of Pistorius and several witnesses not appearing on camera during testimony, has been hailed as “groundbreaking” by the South African media. Sky News correspondent Alex Crawford also wrote that the “judge [Mlambo] was making sure everyone, whoever you are, rich or poor, famous or completely anonymous, can listen and watch this trial and see justice is done”.
Many argue that the move has been a good one as a large cross-section of the South African public was previously unfamiliar with court procedures and practices, the less informed even believing the country operated on a jury system. The court of public opinion has always been a consideration for judges and magistrates, particularly in cases where lives are lost or ruined and the greater community is pained, but in their ruling this has to be weighed up against the merits and arguments of the case. A trial such as this one was always going to draw tremendous scrutiny, but I fear that the television experiment has not worked and has in fact undermined the integrity of South Africa’s courts while giving rise to a subjective public maelstrom that demands and consumes sensational shows of grandstanding on the court room floor each day. Rather than providing scope for objectivity, as proponents of televised court cases argue, the trial has merely served to validate preconceived notions within a naïve and bloodthirsty public domain, much like a viewer would despise a character in a television series simply because they didn’t like him or her.
No greater example can be found than Pistorius’s ex-girlfriend Samantha Taylor, who as one of the first witnesses in the trial testified that Pistorius had cheated on her with Reeva Steenkamp. Following Pistorius’s testimony – heard but not seen on television – that Steenkamp believed negative messages had come from Taylor who has set up false names, Taylor wrote on micro-blogging site Twitter, “Last lies you tell. Better make it worth your while”. She later deleted the post.
Any person by virtue of their basic human rights is entitled to their opinion, but by publicly making statements of this nature when you have already given evidence in a high-profile court case suggests to what extent the Pistorius trial has disintegrated into a spectacle, and standard court practices and etiquette have gone out the window. In any serious court, such a transgression would surely be viewed in a very dim light, the credibility of the witness harshly questioned and their testimony possibly removed from the court record, jeopardising the case.
What is perhaps most interesting is the fact that while the media has for years been rubbished as “sensationalist” and the purveyor of heinous lies, the television coverage has sparked an outpouring of ruthless public bias, the likes of which have seldom been seen in this country before. Calls for prosecutor Gerrie Nel to become president and warnings that “Papa” is waiting for Pistorius in jail [a reference to rape in prison] are commonplace on social media, irrespective of the fact that Nel has been found wanting in his line of questioning on several occasions. Nel can do no wrong, and by employing an approach in which he threateningly tells Pistorius not to argue with him and repeatedly emphasises that he killed Steenkamp in cold blood, he has become a television darling, the caped crusader who doesn’t suffer fools and murderers. Unfortunately Nel’s performance is becoming more reminiscent of a 19-year-old drill sergeant thriving on the humiliation of a new recruit than an astute legal mind, which I am sure it is when there are no cameras trained on him. The prosecutor who was labelled “a man never shy to go to tea early” by a foreign correspondent at the beginning of the trial has upped the ante – the public has spoken.
Not for one moment am I suggesting that Pistorius is not guilty of murder with intent, nor am I saying he is. But having personally witnessed a number of extraordinary court cases in which disabled men were gunned down in places of worship or an alleged paedophile facing 70 charges was found not guilty, the one constant was that due and dignified court process was followed. The verdict may not necessarily always have been the right one, but then that is only one man’s opinion.
Live television is giving credence to too many one man’s opinions, and that is a very dangerous precedent to set going forward in South Africa, especially in cases where an accused may be completely innocent of a crime. British businessman Shrien Dewani, accused of plotting the murder of his wife Anni while on honeymoon in South Africa in 2010, may count himself lucky that his own trial is not televised and overlapped with that of the athlete, given the public knives out for the latter.”
