Early Prison Release Delayed for Oscar Pistorius

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/20/world/africa/early-prison-release-delayed-for-oscar-pistorius.html

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South Africa’s justice minister on Wednesday intervened to delay the early release of Oscar Pistorius, the imprisoned Olympic athlete convicted of killing his girlfriend — 48 hours before he was scheduled to begin serving the rest of his five-year term under house arrest.

The decision by the justice minister, Michael Masutha, was a surprise. It contradicted an announcement in June by the corrections department’s parole authorities that Mr. Pistorius would be transferred from prison to house arrest on Friday.

Mr. Pistorius, 28, will have served one-sixth of his sentence by then, which under South African law makes him eligible for early release. Yet Mr. Masutha said the decision to release him should not have been made before he had served the one-sixth minimum.

In an interview on South Africa’s 702 radio station, Mr. Masutha said the parole authorities might have “misinterpreted the law and been in haste in taking a decision prematurely."

It was not immediately clear whether lawyers for Mr. Pistorius would take legal action in an attempt to invalidate Mr. Masutha’s delay order.

It also was unclear why Mr. Masutha waited until Wednesday to issue the order, since he presumably had known about the parole announcement for a few months. But he suggested in the radio interview that anger by women’s groups may have brought the issue to his direct attention. The Progressive Women’s Movement of South Africa had petitioned the minister to protest Mr. Pistorius’s release, especially during the country’s Women’s Month.

Mr. Pistorius, a double-amputee athlete known as the Blade Runner because of his prosthetic legs, shot his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, a model and aspiring lawyer, in February 2013, and was prosecuted in a globally televised trial.

He was convicted of culpable homicide, the South African equivalent of manslaughter, after his lawyers successfully argued that he mistook Ms. Steenkamp for a burglar hiding in the locked bathroom of his Pretoria home.

Earlier this week, prosecutors filed an appeal of the culpable homicide verdict, arguing that Mr. Pistorius murdered Ms. Steenkamp — who would have turned 32 on Wednesday — after an argument.

That appeal is to be heard in November. A murder conviction could incarcerate Mr. Pistorius for at least 15 years.