home

Oscar Pistorius Trial: The Medical Testimony

By Jeralyn, Section Crime in the News
Posted on Tue Mar 11, 2014 at 08:00:00 AM EST
Tags: Oscar Pistorius (all tags)
Share This: Digg! StumbleUpon del.icio.us reddit reddit

Last week, Oscar Pistorius' defense team spent a lot of time trying to get witnesses to acknowledge that they might have confused the sound of gunshots with the sound of Oscar bashing in the door to to the toilet with a cricket bat. Here's an interesting You Tube video of an experiment comparing the two sounds. Conclusion: If you weren't able to listen to both sounds for comparison purposes, you could easily mistake the sound of the cricket bat for the sound of a gunshot.

Here's a recap of yesterday's testimony. In a nutshell, Reeva was shot three times, in the hip, the arm and the head. She would have died within a few breaths of the gunshot to the head.

The state's expert testified today he thought Reeva had eaten within two hours of her death, which occurred around 3:00 a.m. The defense is challenging the pathologist on the food comment. Why? Oscar said in his bail affidavit they went to sleep around 10:00 p.m. The defense will be calling its own pathology experts to refute the state's expert. Today, on cross-examination, the state's pathologist acknowledged that gastric emptying time can vary from person to person and could vary by an hour or two. While he's certainly a qualified pathologist, apparently he may not be an expert on gastric emptying, which he acknowledged, is not an exact science.

Yesterday and so far today, the live video has been shut down by the Judge due to the sensitive nature of the testimony of the state's pathologist. Yesterday, the judge banned live tweeting and blogging, but today, she reversed herself, saying she hadn't known enough about tweeting and blogging.

The "star" of the trial so far is defense lawyer Barry Roux, who is now being called "the Silver Fox." I've watched enough of the trial to agree with the assessment. Some snippets:

While his performances over the last week have earned him the nickname the Silver Fox, Mr Roux is in fact more like a fellow African native, the Blue Heron, which spreads its wings like a canopy over shallow water. When the fish below swim naively to the surface, thinking they are safe, the Heron swoops.

...he is as persistent and penetrating as a dentist’s drill.

...Mr Roux’s trademark move is to appear slightly befuddled and lost, before going for the jugular with the speed of a cobra. He can use sarcasm and humour, but prefers repetition, asking the witness over and over to explain an earlier answer, before pulling out a transcript to show they had just contradicted themselves.

Roux was just as compelling at the bail hearing.

During Mr Pistorius’s bail application last year Mr Roux took to investigating officer Hilton Botha with such unrelenting venom that a South African journalist likened it to watching a baby seal being clubbed. By the time Mr Botha left the stand he was a gibbering mess....

< Colo. Earns $3.5 Million in Marijuana Taxes

  • The Online Magazine with Liberal coverage of crime-related political and injustice news

  • Contribute To TalkLeft


    • Display: Sort:

    Readers Must Login or Create an Account to Comment

    Sorry, I find the youtube video to be complete (none / 0) (#1)
    by sarcastic unnamed one on Tue Mar 11, 2014 at 08:47:19 AM EST
    poppycock.

    In real life the sound of your neighbor hitting his bathroom door with a piece of wood does at all not sound like him shooting a 9mm handgun.

    While I agree that the sounds (none / 0) (#2)
    by leftwig on Tue Mar 11, 2014 at 09:04:49 AM EST
    are dissimilar enough to be easily distinguishable when heard side by side, if you only hear one of them in the middle of the night from a fair distance, I think the sound produced by hitting a wooden bat against a wooden door could be mistaken for the sound of a gunshot.  I am not saying these witnesses were wrong in their judgment, but its conceivable that they could be.  When you hear a sound and screaming in the middle of the night, your brain is going to focus on the likely sources of that sound which most people would think of a gun shot.  No one is ever going to think that sounded like someone hitting a door with a cricket bat.  The order of which came first matters a great deal to the defense.  IT doesn't matter nearly as much to the prosecution, though their case would be pretty much a slam dunk if they could show that the the shots were last.

    I imagine the pathologist has given testimony on stomach contents before and while I am sure there are more specialized experts in the field, I'll bet his generalizations are pretty close.  The defense will focus on the extreme end, saying its possible the food could have been there up to X number of hours.  The question the experts will need to answer is what is the probability it was there 2 hours, versus 3 hours, versus 5+ hours.  The states witnesses says most like 2 hours, but it could be more or less.  

    Parent

    Having had someone shot to death... (none / 0) (#3)
    by Dadler on Tue Mar 11, 2014 at 11:03:46 AM EST
    ...thirty feet from our bedroom window when we lived in the inner-city, it strains credulity to the highest degree to even suggest the sound could be mistaken for a bat hitting a door. And video in that case just not credible to me. Either you win that argument by simulating real circumstances in real time or you've lost it pitifully. If they want to do their job as defenders, they'll find people who can testify to Oscar's utter paranoia about crime, about this fear of getting caught unable to put on his prostheses. And even then you have a hard time proving he was in any danger ever, since he had a gun within six inches of him his entire adult life, it seems.

    I really am interested to see if the defense can mount something more than boilerplate horsesh*t. They seem like bad American prosecutors right now, flinging crap and hoping it sticks. Maybe with a dipsh*t jury you could wing this junk past them, but a single judge, not a chance, and that should be OBVIOUS to the defense.
     

    Agreed. (none / 0) (#4)
    by sarcastic unnamed one on Tue Mar 11, 2014 at 11:11:41 AM EST


    Parent

    Readers Must Login or Create an Account to Comment