Another Trial Of The Century

Unless you live under a rock right now and some of you no doubt do.....The biggest trial going on right now is the so called "Blade Runner Trial" of former Olympian Oscar Pistorious, the first Olympian to ever compete with prosthetic limbs, who is now on trial for killing his girlfriend... Pistorius shot four times through his bathroom door killing the girl...He claims he awoke and thought that there was an intruder in his house..

In the bathroom? Who breaks into a house to rob it and then suddenly decides they need to use the facilities??

I'll let the jury figure that one out!

But as Oscar Pistorius faces trial for murder, a large group of South African women have become like a shadow that the runner seems unable to shake.

In this already notoriously violent country, a vocal group of women,surprisingly most of them black, say they believe Pistorius’ girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp was a victim of an all-too-common crime, one that crosses all social and racial boundaries: domestic violence.

Violence against women is stunningly common in South Africa, where a woman is killed every eight hours by her intimate partner, according to a recent study by the well-respected Medical Research Council.

No one doubts that Pistorius killed his girlfriend of three months—the sprinter admitted to the shooting in a sworn affidavit just days after the incident on Feb. 14, 2013. He claims he mistook her for an intruder and did not mean to shoot her four times through a locked bathroom door. The prosecution argues that he knew she was behind the door, and that he meant to kill her.

The suggestion that Pistorius, the famous double amputee whose carbon-fiber blades on the track earned him the moniker “Blade Runner,” may have abused his girlfriend has forged an unlikely kinship in a society still fractured around racial lines. Black women have marched regularly outside the Pretoria courthouse where Pistorius’ bail hearing was held in February 2013.

The women, bolstered by the most powerful women’s group in the country, the Women’s League of the ruling African National Congress, say they will continue to march throughout his trial, which began this week and is expected to last at least three weeks and may even stretch for months.

The group of women who gathered on the crowded sidewalk during Pistorius’ bail hearing said they did not know Pistorius or Steenkamp. He lives in an exclusive and wealthy community in Pretoria. Steenkamp rose from modest beginnings in the seaside town of Port Elizabeth to grace the cover of fashion magazines.

Most of the protesters were older black women who took a bus or walked to the court in central Pretoria. In this still-fractured and racially divided society, where the average white household earns six times more than the average black household , their paths would rarely have crossed.

Demonstrators have previously carried signs outside his court hearings, with messages like, “No violence against women" and "No to killing of women and children."

 Those messages, they said, were for him—along with another, more targeted one: “Pistorius must rot in jail.”

WOW!

 Stay Tuned!