^ That's exactly my point - one female witness was adamant she heard a female's 'blood curdling' scream, followed by some bangs...the judge said to her (and I believe others), you are outright wrong, you're mistaken, and you've become confused due to outside influences such as other witnesses and media reporting!? It seems the judge allowed herself subjectivity when assessing the witnesses, but Oscar was beyond reproach - again, despite her admitting she found his testimony implausible.

Have Reeva's family made a statement?

To all the blokes on here (and around the world) who are out on the razzle this weekend - Watch out! There's going to be a lot of pissed off women on the warpath looking to bring fury down on the male species. Especially men who brought hurt and humiliation to an ex, had better be extra vigilant.

Enjoy your weekend

I was not reassured either listening to the judge this morning - who seemed to struggle to construct a coherent sentence.

They BBC were all over the judge a couple of days ago fawning because she is a black woman,But that's the BBC for you.

3 years max for me.

And wouldn't be at all surprised if he walked with community service..

I await the prosecutions response..

most he'll get is a couple of years (halved with time of for good behaviour) in some cushy prison hospital type place. but would not surprise me if he doesn't see one single night in jail.

Yep, but the judge has decided he was only being very ' negligent '  !!

I dont think her sheets were reading from were in wrong order she just had another browser open on screen for holiday / retirement homes .. the reason she adjourned so abruptly on day 1 was to get a deposit down on a place that had just come on the market ... South Africa is notoriously corrupt and this would not suprise me in the slightest.

'........So although Judge Masipa surprised us with the speed with which she adjudicated on evidence and witnesses it's difficult to see legal mistakes in her analysis of why premeditated murder had not been proven beyond reasonable doubt.

That, unfortunately, is where the praise for sound legal reasoning must end. Unlike in many other jurisdictions around the world, you can also be found guilty of murder in South Africa if you could have forseen that your action that you performed could kill someone, but you still performed that action, in effect reconciling yourself with the eventual outcome - death - that will result from your action.

That is what is meant by that pretentious piece of Latin doing the rounds, 'dolus eventualis'. So if Pistorius did not kill Steenkamp as a result of premeditated, unlawful action, it doesn't yet follow in law that he is not guilty of murder.

In between premeditated murder and culpable homicide - which rests on proving the negligent killing of a person - we have two other murder categories in our law: indirectly intending to kill someone (and doing so) or foreseeing you would kill someone and reconciling yourself to that outcome (and then doing so).

We can set aside the idea of 'indirect intent'. It's not at issue in this case. It refers to a case in which, say, I walk into a packed restaurant and I intent to kill my lover and so I shoot at her. She is sitting with her friends and I fatally injure not her but her friend next to her. That kind of scenario is not at play in the Pistorius case.

The nub of the issue today is that 'dolus eventualis' business. And that's where Judge Masipa got it wrong.

Could Pistorius have forseen that shooting at the bathroom door four times would kill someone behind the door? Yes. Did he, knowing that, refrain from shooting? No.

Did he shoot only once, maybe accidentally, such that we might say it's reasonably possibly true he did not reconcile himself to killing the person behind the door? No, he fired four shots, not in rapid succession either, and while controlling the firearm.

He didn't suffer an epileptic seizure that can be described as a loss of voluntary control over your body. Things didn't happen to his body. He acted. Deliberately, intentionally with a view to landing bullets in the body of a person behind that door. All of this by his own testimony and in light of the evidence of shots fired, the number of shots fired and time lapses between each one. He should therefore have been found guilty of murder.

It is a textbook case of dolus eventualis and if this was a criminal law exam Judge Masipa would barely pass: she stated the law correctly (though even this is a generous description since she failed to flesh it out in adequate detail appropriate for such a complex case) but then hopelessly failed to apply the legal standard accurately to the evidence before her, including the testimony of Pistorius himself.

So why did Judge Masipa, you might wonder, think the requirements of dolus eventualis was not met? Here it gets embarrassing I'm afraid. This test in law is a subjective one. We have to ask what Pistorius was thinking. Pistorius told us he thought Steenkamp was asleep in bed. Judge Masipa believes him and takes this as proof that Pistorius did not desire the death of someone behind that bathroom door.

But that is blatantly a misapplication of the law. Who cares if Pistorius sincerely believed Steenkamp was in the bedroom fast asleep? The question is whether he foresaw any human being behind that door - Xolani or Piet or Marita or nameless intruder - dying if he were to shoot at them through that door four times? So it's not legally relevant that Pistorius genuinely didn't think Steenkamp was in the bathroom. The murder charge holds so long as he believed SOMEONE was there, foresaw that four shots in that direction could kill them and reconciled himself to that outcome. And he did.

It gets worse: Pistorius' defence is that he intentionally shot at the door to neutralise a perceived threat. He just didn't think his voluntary shooting was unlawful. But by the standards of dolus eventualis, properly applied, he committed murder in South African law.

Nel can start filing his appeal papers. His prospects are surely good. Judge Masipa won't be the last judge to have a verdict overturned.......'

in the UK doubt the jury would have taken more than 3 or 4 hours to find him unaminously guilty

Facts - that's a pretty damning summary.

Reeva's whereabouts is irrelevant to the whole case. OP knew SOMEONE was behind that door and he fired 4 times in such a way and with such bullets, to kill.

As an aside it never helped the State that the crime scene was contaminated. A copper stole one of OP's watches and the gun was handled without gloves, by a ballistics expert!!!!