I may have read too much Grisham or watched too much Good Wife, but today I caught a few minutes on Sky News of the live proceedings from the Pistorius trial in South Africa. And my one thought was how desperately slow it all was.
This was not born out of a desire to cut to the chase, nor to read the last few pages of the novel first. It was a sympathy for the defendant. Pistorius knows what he has done. He alone does. For when two people walk into a room and only one walks out there is an inevitable bias in the record of what occurred. But he has been found, at the time I write, guilty of culpable homicide and not guilty of murder.
And now he waits while legal arguments are made about the bail possibilities pending sentencing. During this period his current address was broadcast to the world. Again that seems odd to a Brit.
How can one sit calmly for so long awaiting sentence? An attribute of civilised society is that we are not cruel to offenders. We aim to punish them without undue cruelty. We take away liberty not fingernails.
In the absence of a jury, which is how this case has worked, the judge hears arguments then heads off to ponder and research. But presumably she already has a good idea of what sentence to impose. Yet Pistorius must wait. Until mid-October. It takes forever. And that seems harsh.
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