The act itself took barely a couple of seconds yet, by the time the trial of Oscar Pistorius is over, it will have been deliberated over, analysed and picked apart for nearly 18 months by the entire world. The murder trial is no whodunit – Pistorius has never denied shooting his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp and killing her in the early morning of February 14, 2013. Rather, the aim of his trial is to determine the truth or fiction of Pistorius’s claim that her death was a terrible accident. And the global media scrum constantly surrounding this court case has made previously unknown names instantly famous.
First, there is Pretoria itself, the city in which the trial is being held, which has suddenly found itself on the front pages all over the world. Then there’s the judge, Thokozile Masipa. The 66-year old, Soweto-born woman is only South Africa’s second black female judge in history, and she’s playing it down the middle. But the name we’re all talking about at the moment is that of the prosecutor Gerrie Nel who, in front of countless millions of television viewers, has been seen systematically tearing apart the defence as if it’s a rag doll in the jaws of a pit bull terrier.
Nel’s nickname actually is that: the Pit Bull. And while the inevitable Hollywood film version of events is unlikely to be named “Blade Runner and the Pit Bull”, it does have a kind of ring to it, doesn’t it? Pistorius is nicknamed after the Ridley Scott sci-fi classic on account of the remarkable carbon fibre prosthetics he uses to run with and, indeed, he’s mightily quick on them and made history by becoming the first amputee runner to compete at an Olympic (as opposed to Paralympic) Games, in 2012. But will he be quick enough to outrun the Pit Bull? On the face of it, after many long days of cross-examination by Nel, few right now fancy his chances.
While Pistorius’s defence lawyer, Barry Roux, had been downright rude to state witnesses, and subsequently occupying the headlines, Nel was content to sit back and let things unfold, prepared to strike when the moment was right. And boy, did he let rip once the floor was his.
Nel’s is a no-holds-barred approach that has earned him, not just a nickname but an international fan base, too. But judge Masipa is not so star-struck, having warned him a week ago: “Mind your language, Mr Nel. You don’t call the witness a liar, not while he is in the witness box.” She also lambasted him for laughing at Pistorius’s recollection of events that fateful night. “You possibly think this is entertainment. It is not,” she told Nel. “Please restrain yourself.” Nel, not exactly backward in coming forward with witnesses he thinks are being untruthful, had to consider himself told.
But while he’s perfectly at ease with courtroom theatrics, Nel is a very private person and it is said that the persona we’ve all become accustomed to in the past week or so is very different to that known by his friends and family. He’s playing a role and he’s tasked with a job, and the public image that has come to be associated with that is not necessarily correct.
Nel has been a prosecutor for more than 30 years and has been fearless in his pursuit of the bad guy. One famous case was the prosecution of the former anti-apartheid activist Jackie Selebi, who later went on to be South Africa’s highest ranking police officer and president of Interpol – neither of which fazed Nel, who called him an “arrogant liar” during his trial for corruption once he uncovered that Selebi’s wife had shredded key documents relating to the case.
Nel kept Selebi on the witness stand for two whole weeks and ended up being arrested by 20 police officers on trumped-up fraud charges – later dropped – but he relentlessly carried on and secured his conviction. Selebi was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
As a state prosecutor, Nel is alleged to earn in the region of Dh450,000 a year – small pickings compared to the Dh17,400 being earned every day by Pistorius’s defence lawyer – that seems not to bother him, either. For Nel, the principal driving force is truth, honesty and justice rather than money, and his brutal style of interrogation is designed to do just one thing: expose inconsistencies in evidence to uncover what actually happened so that a fair verdict can be achieved.
A legal source, who did not wish to be named, told The Guardian last week: “If you ask, ‘is his cross-examination style unique to Oscar Pistorius?’, the answer is no. That’s how he’s always been. People say he goes for the jugular, but he’s got points to make and he makes them. He’s not shy.”
Nel would have felt no remorse about displaying the graphic police photo of Steenkamp after her death to the witness. “That’s it – have a look, Mr Pistorius,” snapped Nel. “I know you don’t want to, because you don’t want to take responsibility, but it’s time that you look at it. Take responsibility for what you’ve done, Mr Pistorius.”
“It was to show Pistorius the evidence,” said The Guardian’s source. “He blew out her brains and he’s been vomiting into a bucket, but can he please look at what he did? You show the accused the evidence and the postmortem in every case – it’s just that this one has more attention.”
Apartheid might officially be dead in South Africa but in its place arrived swathes of ultra-violence between blacks and whites, along with enormous levels of organised crime and corruption, and Nel has done his bit in destroying this, too. In 2001, an official crime-fighting agency was established, known as the Directorate of Special Operations (nicknamed The Scorpions) and it was headed up by none other than Nel. The group’s mandate was to investigate and uncover human trafficking, drug smuggling, fraud and government corruption – things it did extraordinarily well.
During an investigation into alleged fraud surrounding a South African government arms deal, The Scorpions raided the home of then deputy president Jacob Zuma, and were involved in his 2005 corruption trial. In the space of just three years, The Scorpions had amassed no fewer than 380 prosecutions with a conviction rate of 93.1 per cent. Feathers were ruffled, to say the least, and the African National Congress decided in 2008 that the group had overstepped its boundaries, merging it with the regular police force and relieving it of many of its powers. The Scorpions were disbanded, with another, new group in its place, known as The Hawks.
It was during his time as a Hawk that Nel went up against Selebi – a case that won him the coveted title of Prosecutor of the Year, awarded by the Society of State Advocates, along with a Special Achievement Award from the International Association of Prosecutors (IAP) in 2012. The IAP said Nel’s award was in recognition of his “fierce pursuit of the vision of the NPA’s ideals to achieve justice in society”.
According to South Africa’s Mail & Guardian newspaper, Nel’s career has been dotted with high-profile cases. He was junior prosecutor in the 1993 murder case of the former South African Communist Party leader and anti-apartheid campaigner Chris Hani. Clive Derby-Lewis and Janusz Waluz are currently behind bars for the assassination. In 1995, he prosecuted two youths for gunning down a doctor outside the Charlotte Maxeke Academic Hospital in Johannesburg. Also in the 1990s, Nel sent Kempton Park dentist Casper Greeff to jail for murdering his wife.
Nel was also responsible for sending Hazel Kidson to prison for 25 years for stabbing her husband to death outside their home in Horizon, Roodepoort, in 1996, and he was also one of the prosecutors in the murder trial of Glenn Agliotti, who was arrested in 2006 for the slaying of mining magnate Brett Kebble.
Nel’s fame in South Africa, and now the rest of the world, has still shed no real light on his private life, which he has carefully kept under wraps. But we do know he grew up in the deeply conservative north of the country near the town of Potgietersrus, now renamed Mokopane. According to a report in The New York Times last Sunday, he does have foibles that prove he’s a human being – he’s claustrophobic and avoids using lifts; he doodles complex patterns on his legal pad; and, in his spare time, he teaches children how to wrestle. Even in court he has revealed a softer side, surprising some judicial experts by seeming to ease the pressure on Pistorius at a crucial moment last Friday. “I’m giving the witness time to console himself,” Nel said. “He is distressed.” It was, said The New York Times, “a moment of apparent compassion all the more dramatic for its infrequency”.
More usually, the Afrikaans newspaper Rapport said, quoting a co-worker of Nel, “once he smells blood, he does not stop”. Pit Bull, indeed.
khackett@thenational.ae