slowspoke said:
NZ news is reporting steroids found in the house.
Then it’s official. Pistorius is as disgraced as LA.
I don’t see how a steroid defense is possible, given that he has been trying to put out the story that he thought she was an intruder. You might try to argue that steroids contributed to an emotional outburst that led you to kill an innocent person, but how would they make it more likely that you would think someone was an intruder? Trigger-happy? Maybe, but it seems like a stretch.
Based on the information I’ve seen, it sure doesn’t look like an accident, but neither does it look premeditated. A premeditated murder would not be this messy. There wouldn’t be a bloody cricket bat, nor shots through the bathroom door. Maybe his plan was to make it look as though he had mistaken her for an intruder, but if she was there in bed with him earlier, that scenario doesn’t make any sense. The uncle’s statement that when you wake up in the middle of the night and hear someone in the house, you think it’s an intruder, is self-serving nonsense. If you’re alone in the house, sure, but if you have a bed partner who at that moment is not there, of course you think anyone you hear in the house is her. You'd at the very least be grossly negligent in shooting at someone before you confirmed it wasn't her.
Sounds to me like a classic crime of passion (which would make a steroid defense more conceivable, if he were to change his story). That not only is more consistent with the physical evidence, but also with the way he acted later. I don’t think his emotional breakdown at the police station was an act. I think it just dawned on him that he had done something really horrible that he now deeply regretted. He must have had some positive feelings for her, if he didn’t, how had the woman deceived herself for so long? I think the best explanation is that these feelings were overwhelmed in a moment of intense anger. That probably makes it easier for him to say the killing was accidental, because he would really like to believe it was.