“This trial and this process has been exhausted beyond any conceivable exhaustive process.”

During sentencing hearings in June, a clinical psychologist called as a defence witness told the court in Pretoria that Pistorius was “a broken man”. The multiple gold medal-winning Paralympian, serving six years for murdering his girlfriend on Valentine's Day 2013, was not in court on Friday when the judge ruled that the state's petition had no reasonable prospects of success on appeal. Judge Thokozile Masipa sentenced the Paralympic gold medallist to six years behind bars in July for murdering his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, in 2013, but the prosecution had said the decision was "shockingly lenient". Roux argued that Pistorius had been sentenced to an effective eight-year jail term if one considered the year Pistorius spent in prison for the culpable homicide conviction and time spent under correctional supervision from October last year until July this year when he was sentenced again for the murder conviction. "Any party who has to apply to the trial judge for permission to appeal and is unsuccessful, the option is open for them to petition the Supreme Court of Appeal," said Stephan Terblanche, a law professor at the University of South Africa. ‘The court failed to take into account that the accused fired four shots through the door and he never offered an acceptable explanation for having done so,’ Mr Nel told the hearing, adding, ‘there was a massive chasm between regret and remorse’. Pistorius killed Reeva Steenkamp, a model and law graduate, by firing four bullets from a handgun through a closed toilet door in his luxury home in Pretoria, South Africa’s administrative capital, on Valentine’s Day in 2013.
The Johannesburg High Court rejects an appeal against the sentencing of Oscar Pistorius.