Oscar Pistorius has been sentenced on appeal to 13 years and five months in prison.
The Supreme Court of Appeal of South Africa has increased this Friday the penalty imposed on Oscar Pistorius for murder. “The sentence imposed on the murder is set aside and replaced by the following: the accused is sentenced to imprisonment for a period of 13 years and five months,” the judge said while reading the court’s decision.
The athlete was not in court when it announced the increase of his sentence to 15 years, which has been subtracted from the time he has already been in prison.
The State has argued that the original sentence, which sentenced him to six years in prison, was “surprisingly lenient.” Pistorius was imprisoned in July 2016 after being found guilty of murdering his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, by shooting him four times through the closed door of the bathroom on Valentine’s Day 2013.
Shortly after entering prison, Pistorius was hospitalized for a suicide attempt after being found “with several cuts on his wrists,” said two prison guards.
This was the second time that the Public Ministry appealed the sentence imposed on Pistorius, after doing so with the original sentence of the case, which sentenced him, in October 2014, to five years in prison for a crime of homicide on the grounds that there was no intention of killing the victim. After the Prosecutor’s appeal, in 2015 Pistorius was charged with murder after concluding that he did intend to kill the person inside the bathroom, whether his girlfriend was or not.
In 2016, Judge Thokozile Masipa issued a sentence of six years in prison on the grounds that extenuating circumstances existed, but the Prosecutor’s Office was not satisfied with this conviction and requested a minimum sentence of 15 years, arguing that the athlete has never explained why he fired four times and also, that he was a trained individual and not defenseless.
Pistorius was the first person with both legs amputated to compete in a Paralympic Games, the London 2012, and became an icon of improvement until the murder of his girlfriend ended his career.
