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Oscar Pistorius gets five years and Twitter users aren’t very happy about it

21 Oct 2014

Paralympic athlete Oscar Pistorius at the athletics meeting in Milan, Italy, on 2 July 2008. Photo by miqu77/Shutterstock.com

Paralympic athlete Oscar Pistorius has been sentenced to five years in prison for the shooting death of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp on Valentine’s Day last year. Has justice been served? Twitter users weigh in.

During a hearing this morning in a Pretoria, South Africa, courtroom, judge Thokozile Masipa also gave the sprint runner a three-year suspended sentence for gun charges.

Pistorius’ lawyers have said the law under which he was punished calls for him to serve only one-sixth of the prison term — 10 months — before being released to house arrest, The New York Times reported.

Last month, Masipa found Pistorius guilty of culpable homicide after a trial that had spanned six months by that point.

Just after 3am on 14 Feburary 2013, Pistorius testified he heard a noise in his bathroom, where the toilet is in a cubicle, behind a door.  Believing an intruder was the source of the noise, he grabbed his gun and fired four shots into the toilet door, killing Steenkamp on the other side.

In South Africa, a judge and assessors determine an accused’s guilt or innocence, not juries.

No sooner had Masipa delivered the sentence this morning did #OscarPistorius and #Pistorius begin to trend on Twitter.

Tina Costanza was a journalist and sub-editor at Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com