Lost in the original culpable verdict sentence handed to Oscar Pistorius in the shooting death of girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp was the tremendous public relations victory the defense team earned, according to an author that wrote a book about the subject.
Pistorius' case is headed court as prosecutors earned the right to appeal Judge Thokozile Masipa's ruling that Pistorius was not guilty of murder some 19 months after Pistorius killed Steenkamp by shooting at her four times through a bathroom door in their Pretoria, South Africa home.
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The double-amputee Olympic sprinter testified that he mistook Steenkamp for an intruder that was locked in their bathroom. Masipa originally said that while Pistorius should have known his actions would kill the person behind the bathroom door, he didn't know.
That was the basis of her verdict, rendering him guilty of culpable homicide.
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Author John Carlin, who followed the trial and then wrote a book, "Cast Your Shadow: The Trials of Oscar Pistorius," talked about his findings on station 90.9 WBUR-FM, the National Public Radio affiliate in Boston.
In the interview on the program, "Only a Game" with host Bill Littlefield, Carlin discussed a portion of his book in which he maintained that the outrage over the five-year sentence Pistorius received would have been significantly "far greater if the judge ... had been male and white."
Masipa is a 67-year-old black female.
"One of the really fascinating aspects of this whole trial is that here you have the most famous white man in South Africa being tried by a black lady judge," Carlin said. "Now, the reaction of Pistorius's defense team and, indeed, Pistorius' family was some dismay because they imagined, among other things, that there would be a predisposition on the part of the judge to assume this fell into the category of domestic violence, of gender violence.
Had it been a white male judge, I think we can be pretty confident that there would have been far more of an outcry and far more of a notion that there'd been an element of racial favoritism here and so forth. So I think it proved, somewhat paradoxically I think, to be to Pistorius's favor."
With the Pistorius case heading back to an appeals court, the prosecution again must try its case before a panel of five judges. Carlin, however, said that he found the prosecution's original case lacking in substance.
"And in fact, having sat through the whole trial and seeing how little evidence, how unconvincing the prosecution was, my view now is that both stories (that he didn't know Steenkamp was behind the door and that he did know Steenkamp was behind the door) are extraordinarily implausible."
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