In acquitting OP of murder, Judge Masipa seems to be saying that brutality is part and parcel of ordinary life.
OP and RSs relationship was far from normal.
What is a normal relationship?
Normal relationships are dynamic and unpredictable most of the time, and human beings are fickle, Judge Masipa said explaining why she was not convicting OP of the murder of RS.
"This dynamism, according to Masipa, is why RS professed herself in messages to Pistorius to be scared of you sometimes and how u snap at me and of how you will react to me. (This message was prescient, seeing as, on 14 February 2013, OP was to pump her full of bullets.)
RS felt attacked, she wrote, by the person she deserved protection from. This, according to the judge, is a "normal relationship". And thus, even though OP killed RS, he did not murder her, according to the judge. Instead, she convicted him of culpable homicide."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...olds-Oscar-Pistorius-future-in-her-hands.html
This made me wonder whether Judge Masipa was in a relationship herself and what her life history is for her to be so naive about relationships as if she thinks that brutality is normal.
Masipa was one of ten children five of whom died in childhood, and one of whom was stabbed to death in his 20s Judge Masipas early years were spent in a two-bedroom house where
she was put on lookout duty to watch for police as her grandparents brewed homemade beer. She was a studious young girl who
wasnt a great socialiser.I would be buried in my books. Inspired by her mother, a teacher, she went into social work. To fund her further education she took on additional work as a clerk, a messenger and a tea girl until, finally, she could attend university and study social work graduating in 1974. Aged 29 she marched in support of press freedom and
found herself in prison, sleeping for one night on the concrete floor and disobeying orders to clean the filthy, overflowing lavatories which had been left for them inside their cell. It was an experience which many say helped to cement her passion for human rights, and her hatred of injustice. She married to a tax consultant and with two small children, she began to study law a course which would take her 10 years, funded by her full-time job as a journalist. With her heavy caseload, it is her husband who cooks food for the family.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...olds-Oscar-Pistorius-future-in-her-hands.html
So Masipa is married and has two children and one of her brothers was stabbed to death when she was young.
Maybe the nightmare experience of her short stint in prison, made her feel sympathetic to OP and she thinks that it would be too much of a contrast between his living at Uncle Arnie's mansion and the squalor of a prison cell without his prosthetic legs to give him a prison sentence. (I have read that he would not be able to have them in prison.)
After thinking about this, maybe house arrest in Uncle Arnie's mansion will be OP's sentence on October 13. I hope not!
In justice and law, house arrest (also called home confinement, home detention, or electronic monitoring) is a measure by which a person is confined by the authorities to a certain residence. Travel is usually restricted, if allowed at all. House arrest is a lenient alternative to prison time or juvenile-detention time.
While house arrest can be applied to criminal cases when prison does not seem an appropriate measure, the term is often applied to the use of house confinement as a measure of repression by authoritarian governments against political dissidents. In that case, typically, the person under house arrest does not have access to any means of communication. If electronic communication is allowed, conversations will most likely be monitored. With some electronic monitoring units, the conversations of prisoners can be directly monitored via the unit itself.
Electronic monitoring is considered a highly economical alternative to the cost of imprisoning offenders, especially considering that the convict is often required to pay for the monitoring as part of his or her sentence.
