Masipa said that the balance was tipped in the favour of OP's version in general so that says to me that legally at least she accepted it. If she had not have done then surely she would have found him guilty of not just CH.
I did not say she rejected witnesses but rejected their testimony. Not all of it just, again in a legal sense, that his version was not disproved by evidence of what has become the argument version.
So what of Stipp's evidence? Together with the other ear witness testimony it makes a contradictory picture which was never going to be of a sufficient standard to support the DD charge. If you review the latter parts of Stipp's evidence you will notice many tiny inconsistencies as she tries to toe the prosecution line. Sounds were similar, then the same then similar again. Often the exact terminology followed from the obvious implication of the question.
Well, it depends what you mean by "accepted". Court cases aren't about what's true, but what can be proven true. To her mind (and lots of other legal commentators) the State did not prove their version true to the degree that there couldn't be a reasonably held doubt...even if that doubt was comparatively small. If it's there, she has to give him the benefit of it.
This is an awfully long way from "accepting" that he really believed there was an intruder. I think her comments regarding his honesty and the holes in his story strongly indicates that she didn't really accept it in any meaningful way at all. It's just that nothing could be brought to show uncategorically that he was lying. (To her mind....I personally think there were several things that showed that he was lying).
Again, no....she did not reject the testimony of the ear witnesses. She felt unable to conclude anything substantial from their testimony so felt that it did not assist. She most certainly didn't reject anything....and neither did the defence who used every single thing they heard to build a timeline.
I 100% disagree with you regarding Mrs Stipp. You have always been particularly unfair to her and Burger for no real reason. They are human beings with the same fallibilities as the rest of us, just trying to help by telling the court honestly what they could remember. If you are going to pick your way through every word they uttered with tweezers then of course you will find vague inconsistencies.....you always will with any human account of anything. This is why it is so essential to stand back, look at the big picture and highlight where their stories coincide with other testimony.
What you find when you do this is two entirely separate couples hearing the exact same thing at the same time - a woman screaming and a man shouting in a house where a woman was shot dead by her boyfriend.
I don't care if Mrs Stipp forgot about holding back curtains, or if she included a detail her husband saw in her account, or if Burger refused to indulge Roux in his hypotheticals. These are entirely normal discrepencies from honest sincere witnesses. And try to remember that they were all speaking English as their second language so of course the same terminology will crop up again and again - they don't have access to the same vocabulary they would if it was their first language.
I've said it before, but the most important thing about those ear witnesses is that there were four of them, all telling essentially the same story. Couple this with the fact that both couples took decisive action based on the fact that they heard TWO people that night, not one.....Dr Stipp went to the house worried it was a family murder and children might be involved and the Burger/Johnson's approached the police in the first place because they heard a man AND a woman so were concerned hearing Pistorius's account at the bail hearing.
That is very, very damning however you look at it.
