by Dario Milo and Stuart Scott

On Sunday night, Australia’s Channel 7 broadcast a video showing Oscar Pistorius apparently re-enacting various moments from the night he killed Reeva Steenkamp.

The footage was reportedly filmed in October 2013 by a US company, The Evidence Room, and reports say that it was commissioned by the defence team to assist with trial preparation in order to reconstruct Oscar’s version of events.

Since the broadcast, there has been a cloudburst of media attention dedicated to the issue and what it means for the trial.  Indeed, various reports around the world have used buzz words like “mistrial” quite liberally.

But could the publication of the video down under amount to a mistrial?

We submit not.

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by Dario Milo and Stuart Scott

In an article we wrote for Sunday Times last week we briefly touched on three orders relating to the media that we submit were incorrectly made by Judge Masipa during the Oscar Pistorius trial (for more detail on the first two orders see the earlier post on broadcasting the Oscar trial).

The third order in question related to the banning of any further publication of the exhibits marked “PPP” and “QQQ” (essentially the psychiatric and psychological reports compiled while Oscar was at Weskoppies Psychiatric Hospital), which went beyond the official findings that were read into the record during proceedings.

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