The blades stop turning

So the Oscar Pistorius trial is over - the immense relief not only of the participants but also of the media, who have had to sit in the courtroom or stand outside that damn courthouse, day after day, month in, month out, trying to think of something new to say each time - a trial supposed to take three weeks which dragged out over seven months.

Tens of thousands of words have already been spewed over the verdict.  But what I was reflecting on, is what the trial reveals about the new South Africa.  What would have happened, if a similar incident had happened under apartheid?  Well of course there would have been no Olympic champion, because South Africa was banned from the Olympics.  There were plenty of Springbok rugby heroes though.  What if one of them had shot his girl friend?  The courtroom would have been the same - the system of a judge and two assessors would have been the same, since the democratic SA government has not re-introduced thee jury system.  The judge would of course been an elderly white man, not an elderly black woman, but even the 1970's law under which Pistorius was charged would have been the same.  Under apartheid there was of course the death penalty, and the jail to which Pistorius has been taken - the former Pretoria Central - was where the hangings were carried out.  But, though the present judge said that there cannot be one law for the poor and disadvantaged, and another for the rich and famous, there definitely was one under apartheid - a white man under a capital charge was about 50 times less likely to be sentenced to death than a black man. So the fate of a 1970's Pistorius would likely have been fairly similar to the 2014 one - a moderate jail sentence, with no doubt special conditions vastly better than than of the ordinary inmate.

Actually, many of the high-profile homicide cases in late apartheid South Africa remained unsolved, perhaps because they had political involvement - for instance the grisly murder of the economist Robert Smit, despite a raft of conspiracy theories.  Anybody remember any others?