How Oscar Pistorius's release from prison was blocked

Paralympian Oscar Pistorius was due to be released from prison today and moved to house arrest after serving 10 months of the five-year sentence he received last year for killing his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp .

But at the last minute the justice minister, Michael Masutha, sent the case to the parole review board, suggesting there had been a mistake. He referred to the letter of the law, which says a prisoner “shall serve at least one sixth of his sentence before being considered” for parole – sowing confusion in legal circles.

It comes down to differing interpretations: the justice minister said the parole board should only have begun considering parole on Friday, after Pistorius had completed a sixth of his sentence. The parole board, on the other hand, had decided that Friday was the date on which Pistorius could be released into correctional supervision.
Legal experts said this is how the law had been applied in the past. “Releases [from South African prisons] standardly happen around the one-sixth mark,” said University of Cape Town senior law lecturer Kelly Phelps. “Parole boards have been applying this provision frequently.”
If Masutha’s interpretation is technically correct, it raises the question of what should happen to all those other cases. But is it?

Questions

This is how it happened. The Progressive Women’s Movement of South Africa filed a petition on Monday opposing Pistorius’s release. Masutha met them, considered the petition, scrutinised Pistorius’s case and said he had realised the parole board had erred.
Speaking on South African radio station 702 on Thursday, Masutha told: “Two days ago I received representations from an NGO representing a women’s advocacy group requesting that I review the decision of the parole board to place him on parole with effect from tomorrow…
“I came to the conclusion that the board had erred by sitting and considering his application for parole before the minimum period that he is required to serve.”

The first question this raises is why the decision to place Pistorius under correctional supervision was only rigorously examined a few days before the athlete was due to be released. “Why are we deciding what his eligibility for release is two days before the man is due to leave prison?” asked attorney David Dadic, who has been following the trial closely.
The date of Pistorius’s release has been widely advertised for close to two months. Given the level of international scrutiny of the case, it’s strange that this was all so last-minute. “To come up with this at the final hour,” says Phelps, “leaves one feeling that they’ve been scouring the books [for a way to stop the release].”
The second question concerns the circumstances under which Masutha received the petition. In several interviews since he announced his decision, Masutha has said: “I ordinarily do not peruse petitions.”
Why, then, did he peruse this one?

Political influence

When he described the Progressive Women’s Movement of South Africa (PWMSA) as an “NGO representing a women’s advocacy group”, he may have been technically accurate, but there’s more to it. Though their website no longer exists, the group appears to have been established by the African National Congress’s Women’s League about 10 years ago.
Though the PWMSA says it is an umbrella body for 80 organisations, including religious groups, its ties to the ANC Women’s League are clear. The group’s convenor Jacqui Mofokeng , the Gauteng head of the ANC Women’s League at the time of the Pistorius trial, religiously attended court in the company of Reeva Steenkamp’s family in 2014.
Mofokeng is a significant political figure: she previously served as deputy chief whip in the Gauteng legislature. When Masutha says he was paid a visit by women’s rights advocates from an NGO, that’s true. But it’s also true to say that he was paid a visit by an old ANC comrade. Did that help secure the attention of the minister?

It’s also worth noting that the PWMSA’s petition merely said Pistorius should be kept behind bars for the duration of August, because it’s Women’s Month.
Mofokeng told journalists: “If he was released any other month, we wouldn’t have a problem”. Leaving aside the obvious point that the PWMSA does not seem to mind whether other killers or rapists of women are released in August, this magical thinking around Women’s Month is downright dangerous.
What it suggests is that women should be granted special handling for 31 days in August, but for every other month must resign themselves to substandard treatment. September? Oh, that’s fine for Pistorius’s release. Not August, though. Not in our special month.
“It’s time for the justice department to show us what they can do,” Mofokeng told SAFM radio. “We are not ruling out that the minister can do something for the women of this country.” And the minister appears to have obliged.

High-level interventions

This is not the first time that we have seen high-level intervention in the Pistorius case.
“The most stark example was when the commissioner of correctional services himself testified in the trial,” says Phelps. (Commissioner Zach Modise testified to the prison conditions Pistorius could expect to experience.) This would, of course, be virtually unthinkable in an ordinary prosecution.

“It does start to leave one with a sense of discomfort,” Phelps says. “It seems like the absurd outcome of what I think is an attempt to show [Pistorius] is not being given special treatment – but in the process, he is given special treatment!”
Masutha has had to preside over some hugely contentious decisions over the course of his relatively short tenure. One of these was the former policeman Eugene de Kock, commander of apartheid South Africa’s secret death squads, which Masutha deferred for another procedural reason: in that case, that the victims’ families had not been consulted.
Parole boards are evidently not infallible. In another case two people were ordered back to jail in June 2013 following “gross wrongdoing” by the parole board which approved their release.
Many of us would be happy to see Pistorius stay behind bars for a lot longer than 10 months. But the idea that political forces – however muted – might have a role in determining how long people stay in jail is one that causes some discomfort.


 The Guardian