The murder trial of South Africa “Blade Runner” Oscar Pistorius is turning into a media frenzy because it is the first trial in the country in which at least the audio is being broadcast liive, Nomsa Maseko of BBC tells NPR. Pistorius, the famed Olympic athlete and double amputee, is charged with murdering his girlfriend, model Reeva Steenkamp, on Valentine’s Day 2013. Pistorius he has admitted to fatally shooting her; the trial hinges on whether he intended to kill or if her death was, as Pistorius put it, a devastating accident.
Maseko reports “huge, media contingents” both inside and outside the courtroom. Maseko said a judge allowed the partial live broadcast “to show the world and not just South Africans that these celebrities, they’re not above the law. And he wants to show that anybody – not as if – if this was shown in court, it wouldn’t be infringing on Oscar Pistorius’s human rights. But of course, we also need to remember that in this country, we are seeing alarming and escalating waves of domestic violence of women in particular.”