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Nel’s 9 points closing argument that would determine Pistorius’s fate

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Nel described Pistorius as both deceitful and an appalling witness, whose testimony represented a mosaic full of misplaced tiles and tailored evidence necessitated by the snowball effect of having to account for repeated inconsistencies.

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The 40th day of Oscar Pistorius’s murder trial saw both the Blade Runner’s father Henke and Reeva Steenkamp’s father Barry in court on the day prosecutor Gerrie Nel began his closing arguments.

Pistorius stands accused of murdering his girlfriend Steenkamp, after shooting her in his Pretoria home last year. Pistorius claims he mistook her for an intruder and has pleaded not guilty.

Nel described Pistorius as both deceitful and an appalling witness, whose testimony represented a mosaic full of misplaced tiles and tailored evidence necessitated by the snowball effect of having to account for repeated inconsistencies.

Nel presented the court with a “bakers dozen” of incongruities in the Paralympian’s version of what happened in the early hours of Valentine’s Day last year when he shot Steenkamp, including:

1. Pistorius’s answers to questions about the Zombie Stopper video, which showed Pistorius firing shots at a watermelon on a shooting range. Nel said that Pistorius first denied he knew the term “zombie stopper” and knew nothing about the video but later admitted that he had said the words in the video.

2. Differences between Pistorius’s statement in his bail application and his testimony as to where he was when he heard noises in the bathroom, which he believed came from an intruder. In his bail application he said he was on the balcony, but during testimony he said that he was inside his bedroom.

3. The number of fans Pistorius said he had moved into the bedroom. During his bail application, Pistorius referred to one fan, but in his testimony he referred to two. This, the state argued, was because – for Pistorius’s version to be true – he needed to allow Steenkamp time to get to the bathroom.

4. During cross-examination, Pistorius said he placed the fans in a particular spot in the bedroom, which police photos showed was occupied by a duvet. Nel argued that this was to allow for Pistorius’s version that he had made his way onto the balcony to shout for help, and that this was further evidence of the snowballing effect of the Blade Runner’s lies. Because Pistorius, according to Nel, now needed to explain where the duvet would have been if it was not where it was shown in the photo, he said it had not been there at the time. “If the one piece of the mosaic is moved, the rest also have to be moved in order to keep the picture intact,” Nel said.

5. Pistorius’s claim that the duvet and other objects had been moved by the police. This, Nel argued, would require a conspiracy on the part of the police too complicated and improbable because they would have had to move objects before the photo was taken in order to undermine Pistorius’s version of events, of which they had no knowledge at the time.

6. Having said that the duvet was on the bed, Pistorius now had to backtrack regarding when he had last seen Steenkamp, Nel said. Pistorius testified that he had not seen Steenkamp when he woke up and that the room had been pitch black. He later said that he could make out Steenkamp’s silhouette under the duvet on the bed. Nel argued that if it was pitch black, Pistorius would not have been able to see Steenkamp under the duvet and the balcony light was on. He urged the court to reject Pistorius’s “elaborate, false version … and to accept that the accused knew the deceased was in the toilet and fired four shots with dolus directus to kill her”.

7. Nel declared Pistorius’s testimony that he had picked up a pair of jeans on the floor to cover a blue LED light was “so improbable that it cannot be reasonably true”. Nel said Pistorius had manufactured this in order to maintain his version that he was unable to see Steenkamp leave the room and go to the bathroom. Nel then asked the court how, if the jeans Pistorius had used to cover the LED light had then landed on top of the duvet, the duvet had been on the bed.

8. Why Pistorius never mentioned in his bail application that he had a conversation with Steenkamp when he woke up, but introduced this during his testimony. Nel pointed out that all the neighbours who had partners had testified that they had either woken up or were woken up by their partners on hearing noises, but Pistorius had not. Nel pointed out that at first Pistorius had said that he had whispered to Reeva but later changed this to “spoke in a soft manner”. Nel argued that Pistorius had changed this because whispering would imply proximity to Steenkamp and make his explanation as to why he had not waited for a response from her more improbable.

9. If, as Pistorius claimed, he had activated the alarm before going to bed and then deactivated it before carrying Steenkamp down the stairs, this would indicate unreasonable and calculated behaviour not in keeping with the actions of a man who had just discovered that he had shot his girlfriend, Nel said. Also, argued Nel, if there were intruders in the house, surely activating the alarm would have been the wiser thing to do.

Nel is pushing for the court to reject Pistorius’s version of events as “improbable, untruthful and, at the very least, not reasonably possibly true.

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