psychology
Marcus Roberts
746
In a country where 50 people are murdered every day, with only half of all murder cases being sent to court, and a shocking 12% of which result in a guilty verdict (South Africa Statistics Association, 2015), South Africa is considered the ‘the most murderous society on earth’ (Nedcore Project, 2015). The South Africa Statistics Association (SASA) recently revealed that next to war torn countries, the high murder rate makes this country the worse conflicted area in the world (McCafferty, 2015). The statistics speak for themselves, it is clear that the South African Criminal Justice System is failing. Arguably, that was until yesterday… perhaps things are starting to change in a society that is deemed to have the highest rates of violence against women in the world (Faul, 2013).
For over two years, millions of people across the world have watched the South African Justice System unfold in the Oscar Pistorius trail. Prosecution and defence have traded blows over what happened the night Oscar Pistorius killed his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp. The reason as to why Pistorius shot four deadly blows through a locked bathroom on 14 February 2013 is likely to remain a mystery. Whether Pistorius knew it was Steenkamp behind the bathroom door, or an intruder, will perhaps be debated for years. But the shock that exploded across the world when Pistorius was convicted of culpable homicide, spending only one year in prison from taking an innocent life, was uncontested. Indeed, in one survey only 7% of the British public believed him to be innocent (Dalgreen, 2015).
In my opinion, yesterday, the courts in South Africa have made an unprecedented leap in the justice system, when Pistorius’ original verdict was overturned and replaced with murder. This conviction (which carries a minimum of 15 years in South Africa) comes unanimously from five judges, stating that Pistorius ‘never offered an acceptable explanation’ for firing four times through closed doors. Although we may never know exactly what happened the night Steenkamp was killed, one thing is certain, the logistics of Pistorius’ account is by all means a far stretch of the imagination. Perhaps Judge Judy summed it up best when she stated that defendants provide such elaborate stories…‘don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining’.
This article looks very dubious and not compatible with a university website.
I doubt the “shock that exploded across the world” by the original culpable homicide charge actually took place. The world is much tougher and harder-boiled than that. Apart from South Africa, I don’t think many people outside English-speaking, white countries were even watching it.
South Africa isn’t in the top 50 most dangerous countries according to world leaders in the security field and has less violence against females than many jurisdictions – and why is the author quoting racist sources?
Considering there was a plethora of public outrage that was highly publicised after Judge Thokozile Masipa handed down a six-year sentence, which also included a media storm of local and international celebrities dominating social media with their outrage, there was very much a “shock that exploded across the world”. In fact, Judge Thokozile Masipa had an inclination of the outrage that might follow, as such, before handing down her sentence, she reminded the court that “public opinion may be loud and persistent, but it can play no role in this case.” Even before the verdict was announced, the global interest in the Oscar Pistorius case resulted in some extraordinary logistical arrangements, including traffic restrictions to allow for media to be stationed on the street outside the court. They also had to set aside two court rooms for the trial — one for the actual proceedings and another for the media overflow. There were around 300 media houses from around the world (not just ‘English-speaking, white countries’) who applied to be allowed inside the actual courtroom and overflow courtroom, with only 80 of them being successful. These included the world’s major broadcasters and correspondents, many of which temporarily abandoned their other posts to cover the ‘Trial of the Century’, as dubbed by a number of media and empirical sources (e.g., Wallace, 2016). With that, according to Data Driven Insight (2016), who complied information about the Oscar Pistorius trial from various social media platforms. They found over 6.2 million social media outlets regarding the trial from around the world, including coverage of the trial from 60,000 global online newspapers. The trial was literally “one of the most watched, most tweeted and most hyped murder trials in history”. (Smith, 2014), having been watched by ‘tens of millions around the world’, including those residing outside ‘English-speaking, white countries’.
To illustrate further, the trial was followed extensively by a number of non-‘English-speaking, white countries’. To name a few, these included; India (The Times of India), China (China Daily), Thailand (Bangkok Post), Japan (The Japan News), Philippines (Philippine Daily Inquirer) and Korea (Joogang Daily), along with a number of news outlets across Africa ( e.g., Nigeria, Uganda, Egypt, Tunisia and Zimbabwe).
Furthermore, South Africa is in fact one of the most dangerous countries in the world, according to a number of empirical data sources. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2013) carried out a global study on homicide rates. The report found that the global average homicide rate stands at 6.2 per 100,000 population, with South Africa showing an average rate of over five times higher than that (34.27 per 100, 000 population). South Africa ranked 8th out of 219 countries in terms of homicide rate. Similarly, a survey carried out by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2015) ranked South Africa second for assault and murder per capita and first for rapes per capita in a data set of 60 countries. In 2013, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights stated that there is a “pandemic of sexual violence” in the country, further noting that South Africa has “the highest rates of rape reported in the world”. In 2017, The Global Peace Index ranked South Africa at the 41st most dangerous country in the world.