Mike Hutchings/Reuters
Oscar Pistorius in court on Friday.
PRETORIA, South Africa — After four days of combative hearings, a South African magistrate on Friday granted bail for Oscar Pistorius, the double amputee track star accused of murdering his girlfriend, in a case that has horrified and fascinated the nation.
Magistrate Desmond Nair announced the decision after hearing impassioned final arguments from the defense and the prosecution in Courtroom C of the Pretoria Magistrates Court in the presence of an emotional Mr. Pistorius, who has testified that he mistook his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, for an intruder and never intended to kill her.
Magistrate Nair said Mr. Pistorius did not represent a flight risk and was not likely to interfere with state witnesses.
”The accused has made a case to be released on bail,” the magistrate concluded. Pistorius family members in the packed courtroom shouted, “Yes!”
The magistrate set bail at 1 million rand, or about $112,000.
Before announcing his ruling, the magistrate reprised the four days of conflicting arguments by defense and prosecution lawyers. Mr. Pistorius’s shoulders shook with emotion and tears fell from his eyes as, at one point, Magistrate Nair said, “The deceased died in his arms.”
Magistrate Nair said bail was not a matter of guilt and innocence but about determining whether justice would be served by holding a defendant in custody.
But he took issue with the testimony and actions of the prosecution’s lead investigator, Detective Warrant Officer Hilton Botha, who has since been removed from the case, saying the officer committed “several errors and concessions” and “blundered” in gathering evidence.
“It is his evidence that may have been tarnished by cross-examination, not the state case,” he said. At the same time, the state case was not so “strong and watertight” that Mr. Pistorius “must come to the conclusion that he has to flee.”
In a two-hour summary of the case and of the laws governing bail, the magistrate also read a series of character references from friends of the athlete, who described his relationship with Ms. Steenkamp, a 29-year-old model and law school graduate, as loving and happy.
The prosecution had opposed the sprinter’s application to be released on bail until a full trial, arguing that he might flee. It said Mr. Pistorius, 26, murdered Ms. Steenkamp when he fired four shots through a locked bathroom door at his home in a gated community in Pretoria on Feb. 14 while she was on the other side.
The sprinter, who underwent double amputation as an infant after being born without fibula bones and uses prostheses, has said he believed that the person in the bathroom was an intruder.
Magistrate Nair said that while the prosecution case rested on “nothing more than circumstantial evidence,” there were “improbabilities that need to be explored” in Mr. Pistorius’s account of events.
“The only person who knows what happened there is the accused,” he said. But “I cannot find that it has been established that the accused is a flight risk.”
He cited legal requirements that the defense must establish “exceptional circumstances” to qualify for bail in cases of premeditated murder.
Premeditated murder is the most serious murder charge under South African criminal law and carries a mandatory life sentence, with parole in 25 years at the latest.
Mr. Pistorius’s lawyer, Barry Roux, said Friday that if he were prosecuting the case, the charge would be culpable homicide — a less serious charge implying either negligence or a lack of intention to kill. Prosecutors say judges decide the sentence for culpable homicide depending on the circumstances.
With his head bowed as he entered the court on Friday in advance of the ruling, Mr. Pistorius appeared to be struggling to hold back tears, his jaw clenched, as the prosecutor described Ms. Steenkamp’s plight on Feb. 14.
Magistrate Grants Bail for Pistorius
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Magistrate Grants Bail for Pistorius
