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Oscar Pistorius

Pretoria – Despite Oscar Pistorius not having a job, the social worker who compiled a report on the Paralympian recommended he be sentenced to correctional supervision, the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria heard on Tuesday.
“This particular accused you’re making special because he doesn’t have a job and you don’t care,” prosecutor Gerrie Nel told Annette Vergeer during sentencing proceedings for Pistorius.

Nel asked her if an accused did not have a job, would it bother her in recommending a sentence.

Vergeer earlier presented her report on Pistorius, which the defence had paid her to compile, to the court. In it she recommended that Pistorius get three years of correctional supervision and community service for killing Steenkamp. “You can’t look at one factor, you have to look at the person in totality,” she replied.

Pressed for an answer on what job Pistorius would do, Vergeer said: “We don’t know what the outcome of the criminal trial will be.”

During the exchange Pistorius’s sister Aimee lifted a small blue water bottle to her mouth. The plastic cracked between her fingers.

Pistorius’s uncle Arnold took off his glasses, lifted them up to the light, and cleaned them.

“Why did you not ask the accused to be more specific about his future plans?” Nel persisted.

Vergeer said one could not generalise. The evasive reply further exasperated Nel, who pointed out that she had been in court to testify many times before.

“If you haven’t given evidence in court I would perhaps have understood,” he said.

On September 12 Judge Thokozile Masipa found Pistorius guilty of the culpable homicide of his girlfriend, model and law graduate Steenkamp, but not guilty of her murder. Pistorius had claimed he thought there was a burglar in his toilet when he fired four shots through the locked door in the early hours of 14 February last year, killing Steenkamp. The State had argued he killed her during an argument.

Masipa found Pistorius guilty of discharging a firearm in public, when he shot from his friend Darren Fresco’s Glock pistol under a table at Tasha’s restaurant in Melrose Arch, Johannesburg, in January 2013.

Pistorius was found not guilty on two firearms-related charges – illegal possession of ammunition, and shooting through the open sunroof of a car with his 9mm pistol while driving with friends in Modderfontein on 30 September 2012. — Sapa.