Former Paralympic athlete Oscar Pistorius has filed papers to South Africa’s Constitutional Court, appealing against his 13-year jail term for murdering his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp. A court last month increased Pistorius’s sentence for murdering Reeva Steenkamp to 13 years after the judges ruled it as “shockingly lenient’ in the latest stage of a long court battle since his trial in 2014.
He was initially jailed for six years in 2016 for shooting Steenkamp dead at their Pretoria home. Pistorius shot dead Steenkamp in the early hours of Valentine’s Day in 2013 when he fired four times through the door of his bedroom toilet claiming he thought she was an intruder.
Pistorius was originally convicted of culpable homicide the equivalent of manslaughter but his conviction was upgraded to murder on appeal. Pistorius filed papers in South Africa’s Constitutional Court on Monday challenging the appeals court ruling.
The judgement, he argued, disregarded material findings of the trial court, which showed compelling circumstances justifying a departure from the prescribed sentence. Fifteen years is the minimum usually given for murder.
