Reeva Steenkamp murder case: Oscar Pistorius' sentence to be decided in June

Pretoria: A South African court will convene in June to determine disgraced Paralympic athlete Oscar Pistorius’s sentence for murdering his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, a judge said in Pretoria on Monday. Pistorius’s lawyers last month failed in their final legal bid to reverse a Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) judgement that upgraded his conviction from culpable homicide — the equivalent of manslaughter — to murder. The double-amputee killed Steenkamp, a model and law graduate, in the early hours of Valentine’s Day three years ago, saying he mistook her for an intruder when he shot four times through the door of his bedroom toilet. [caption id=“attachment_2736106” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  File photo of Oscar Pistorius. AP[/caption] “Your matter is postponed until 13 June, and it will be heard until 17 June, do you understand?” Judge Aubrey Ledwaba told Pistorius, who answered “Yes.” Pistorius, wearing a black suit, black tie and white shirt, left the court after the brief hearing and walked through a scrum of television camera crews outside to get into a vehicle. The former Paralympic champion, 29, faces a minimum 15-year jail term for murder, which may be reduced due to time he has already spent in prison. He was released from jail in October to live under house arrest at his uncle’s property in Pretoria after serving one year of his five-year sentence for culpable homicide. Appeal judges in December described his testimony at his trial in 2014 as “untruthful” and delivered a damning indictment of the original verdict. They found him guilty of murder, overruling the culpable homicide conviction. Pistorius’s lawyers tried to take the case to the Constitutional Court, the highest court in South Africa, but it declined to hear the matter. Pistorius was last seen in public at a bail hearing in December, after which he was fitted with an electronic monitoring tag. His legal team told the judge on Monday that the tag had been replaced three times but was often sending false alerts that he had left his uncle’s house.