LemonMousse
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your original quote highlighted the scope for [mis]interpretation within that law... so marsipa has been limited by a badly written law. if the law allowed for 'a person' rather than 'the deceased' in the paragraph you highlighted then she would have been able to convict eventualis.
a win for court legalese, a defeat for common sense.
which imo, doesn't get to the bottom of what actually happened, just to what has been judged/proven under sa law.
Not pretending to be a lawyer....but I think you are mistaken.
The passage quoted is regarding a murder charge, so clearly there is a "deceased" - otherwise there would be no murder charge.
Changing it to "person" would make no difference.
Someone is dead, and that someone is the deceased. This has no bearing at all on whether the deceased died because of an intentional, deliberate act or a mistake.
Masipa's mistake is (according to the law professionals) that while she acknowledged that there was no transference of intent just because he didn't know it was Reeva, she did not take this into account when applying it to Eventualis. Who was behind the door is irrelevant to an Eventualis conviction, but she based her decision on the fact (to her) that he didn't know it was Reeva, and couldn't have foreseen that it was her, since he thought she was in bed.
This is nonsensical. Because even if he thought she was in bed, he knew someone was behind the door. So why didn't she address this? Does she think he didn't intend to kill the person behind the door, whoever that was?
My understanding of what the lawyers are saying, and it's bit nothing to do with confusion over "deceased" and "person".