Oscar Pistorius, a convicted murderer, had filed a court petition to order the head of the Atteridgeville Correctional Center to hold a parole hearing for him.
The case was scheduled to be heard on Friday at the Gauteng High Court in Pretoria. Nevertheless, the parties’ agreement caused the judge assigned to the case to remove it from the roll.
According to IOL, a question about whether Correctional Services had agreed to hold a parole hearing for Pistorius went unanswered as well.
In papers submitted as part of his request to force the parole board to meet and consider his release, Pistorius claimed that, in accordance with him, he was already qualified for release on parole in February of last year because he had completed half of his prison term.
In accordance with Pistorius and Knight’s calculations, he has already served five of the fifteen years that the Supreme Court of Appeal ordered him to serve.
However, prison officials claimed in their court documents that based on their calculations, he would have completed only half of his sentence by March of the following year.
After trial Judge Thokozile Masipa of the Gauteng High Court, Pretoria, sentenced him to six years in prison in October 2014, the Supreme Court issued a number of appeals and orders that led to the uncertainty surrounding the length of his incarceration.
After the State appealed the decision, Pistorius was found guilty of murder by the Supreme Court in 2017.
His sentence was increased by the Supreme Court to 13 years and 5 months in prison. As a result, he would be qualified for parole in 2023.
But due to his conviction for culpable homicide, he had already spent slightly more than 500 days in jail at that point.
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However, the Supreme Court once more changed his sentence and decided that Judge Masipa’s initial sentence of 13 years and 5 months should be retroactively applied to the date in 2014. Knight claimed that, taking this into account, he had already served half of his jail sentence.
In an effort to dispel the ambiguity, Correctional Services and Knight both previously sent letters to the Appeal Court. It is unclear if it had actually been done. As part of a victim and offender dialogue, Pistorius earlier met with Barry Steenkamp, the deceased Reeva Steenkamp’s father. It is a component of restorative justice and is included in the documentation provided to the parole board.
According to an affidavit filed by Pistorius, authorities at the Atteridgeville prison informed him that his parole hearing was scheduled for October of last year. The hearing did not occur, however, because all the required reports were missing.
Pistorius stated that he had done everything in his power to ensure that everything on his end was in order. He remarked that he was a model inmate. “I humbly submit that I have done everything in my power to rehabilitate, to conduct myself in such a way as to always comply with the prison rules, and to demonstrate complete contrition.”
Pistorius stated that he had completed all prison programs and was therefore eligible for parole.