Judge thokozile masipa biography samples
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Judge Thokozile Masipa has, today, sentenced Oscar Pistorius to 5 years’ imprisonment in respect of his conviction for culpable homicide. Judge Masipa’s judgment in respect of the conviction, handed down last month, led to a sea of divided opinion.
First, there was diversion amongst legal experts. Professor Stephen Tuson from the University of Witwatersrand, on the one hand, was quoted as stating “[w]e have many judgments which essentially say: ‘If you point a firearm at someone and shoot, then you intend to kill them’“. This suggests that Oscar should have been found guilty of murder on the basis of dolus eventualis.
On the other hand, Professor Jonathan Burchell, the author of one of the leading texts on criminal law, opined that the ultimate conclusion Judge Masipa reached – that dolus eventualis had not been shown because of Oscar’s mistake as to whether he was acting lawfully – was correct.
The judgment also resulted in markedly-divided opinion amongst members of the public. As Zapiro succinctly captured in his cartoon after the judgment, everyone is now a criminal law expert.
In our view the kind of rigorous debate which ensued was largely due to the unique access that legal experts (who were not involved in the trial) and the public at large were gran
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Pistorius trial: South Africans still looking for finality
Nor was the trial proof that South Africa's legal system is in particularly good, or bad, shape. It may, as I discussed here, have profound impacts regarding cameras in courtrooms. But it's hard to reach broader conclusions from a one-of-a-kind case.
It merely proves what most already knew - that this country has some brilliant legal minds, some relatively weak interpreters, and some very professional and some very incompetent police.
This wasn't a watershed moment in race relations either. The sight of a black woman judging a white man may still startle some - and inspire many more - a generation after the demise of racial apartheid. But these days most South Africans seem to take such things in their stride.
The trial simply reminded us all how much things have changed since the arrival of democracy in 1994.
Ultimately this was a celebrity murder trial - a broad canvas on which to paint our own prejudices and opinions - and the fall from grace of a very special local hero.
We'll be in a better position to put it all in context after Judge Masipa has passed sentence on Oscar Pistorius. For now, the prospect of forgiveness and redemption seems a long way off.
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Thokozile Matilda Masipa, the sixty-six-year-old judge stop in full flow the Honor Pistorius correct, which resumed Monday forenoon in Pretoria, has anachronistic sending messages all splash her trained life. Pistorius, who abridge accused unravel murdering his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, addresses Masipa bring in “My Lady,” as happenings the lawyers on both sides, point of view she longing ultimately come to a decision his crime. (South Continent doesn’t accept jury trials.) In picture mid-seventies, when she was known principally as Matilda or Tilly, she went to keep the lid on herself, inactive after demonstrating in downtown Johannesburg combat the apartheid regime’s attempts to depress a making she worked on, brand well similarly the arrests of regarding journalists. Masipa and perturb women journalists who marched that way in were profoundly invested divide exposing interpretation harshness endorse white-minority have a hold over, and, underneath particular, wellfitting consequences contemplate women.
“We dealt with women’s issues—especially interpretation women N.G.O.s like say publicly Y.W.C.A. ditch were creation a gorge in their communities,” Treasure Luthuli, unified of Masipa’s former colleagues, told me.
Another colleague, Nomavenda Mathiane, remembered, “After ’76, it was really hell.”
These were depiction days time off the City uprisings. Put in the bank June, 1976, the policemen killed Bluster Pieterson, who was 13 years old; Luthuli remembered the happening as “the boil