Former Paralympic star Oscar Pistorius has been granted parole and will be released on 5 January after being jailed for nine years for the murder of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, on Valentine’s Day in 2013.
The parole will last until 5 December 2029 and Pistorius will be subjected to conditions set out by the parole board until his sentence ends.
“What will happen until January is he will be on a pre-release programme which is when an inmate is prepared for life outside of the correctional facility,” department of correctional services spokesperson Singabakho Nxumalo told a media briefing on Friday.
Steenkamp’s mother, June, did not object to the parole ruling, although she has previously said that she did not believe Pistorius had been rehabilitated.
In a victim impact statement presented to the parole board and read out by the family’s representative, Rob Matthews, on Friday, June Steenkamp said she was “concerned for the safety of any woman”, saying Pistorius’s “temper and abusive behaviour towards women” had not been addressed in prison.
She added that because of the case, Reeva’s father Barry Steenkamp had “died from a broken heart” in September.
“My dear Barry left this world utterly devastated by the thought that he had failed to protect his daughter and therefore in his role as father, as he perceived it,” she said.
“The only hope he had left was that Oscar would find it in himself to eventually tell the full truth. It is my hope that parole decisions treat the safety of women as the most important consideration by exercising their power judiciously.”
In a statement the department said as a first time offender with a “positive support system” Pistorius’s parole placement was in line with the Correctional Services Act.
Pistorius shot Steenkamp through the bathroom door of his home in Pretoria on 14 February 2013, claiming that he mistook her for an intruder.
He was initially jailed for five years in 2014 for culpable homicide by the Pretoria high court, and released on parole in 2015 after serving a fraction of his sentence. But the supreme court of appeal found him guilty of Steenkamp’s murder that same year after the state had appealed against the original high court conviction.
The high court then sent Pistorius back to jail for six years in 2016, which was less than the 15-year minimum term sought by prosecutors. In 2017, the supreme court of appeal raised his murder sentence to 13 years and five months.
Pistorius was denied parole in March this year after the parole board ruled that he had not completed the minimum detention period required to be considered for parole. But the constitutional court in October ruled that Pistorius had served half of his sentence by March 2023, which meant he was eligible for parole after his sentence was dated to July 2016 instead of November 2017.
The department said Pistorius would have an assigned monitoring official to implement his parole requirements.