Convicted murderer Oscar Pistorius is so severely depressed and "broken" that he is unable to give testimony at his own sentencing hearing, a defence psychologist has told court.
But a prosecutor questioned the claim, noting that Mr. Pistorius was recently able to give an exclusive interview to a British TV network for broadcast after the sentencing.
Mr. Pistorius, the former Olympic hero who was found guilty of murder for shooting his girlfriend through a bathroom door in 2013, bowed his head and wept quietly as psychologist Jonathan Scholtz described him as a shattered and deteriorating man who suffers from clinical anxiety, heavy depression, lethargy, self-loathing, memory loss, and post-traumatic stress syndrome.
"He seems to have given up," Mr. Scholtz told the hearing in a Pretoria court, where the double-amputee celebrity athlete could face a sentence of up to 15 years in prison.
The psychologist, who assessed Mr. Pistorius in many hours of interviews in 2014 and again last month, argued that he should be in hospital for treatment, rather than in prison.
He said Mr. Pistorius was traumatized by being unable to attend the funeral of his girlfriend, lawyer and model Reeva Steenkamp, or properly mourn for her. He said he also suffered from being treated like a "caged animal" in prison, where he acquired an infection on his leg stumps from the cement floor.
Mr. Pistorius, a former gun hobbyist, has sold all his guns and is traumatized even by the sound of gunshots in movies, Mr. Scholtz said. "He never wants to touch a firearm again."
Mr. Pistorius spent a year in prison after his earlier conviction for manslaughter, and was paroled in October. But then in November a higher court overturned the manslaughter conviction and replaced it with a murder conviction, ruling that he had intentionally tried to kill whoever was behind the bathroom door. He remained on parole while he awaited the sentencing for murder.
He is afraid of going out in public because he has been vilified in the media, and recently he had to flee a grocery store when a customer complained to the managers about "shopping with a murderer," Mr. Scholtz told the court. He even expressed anxiety that, if he has children, they might Google his name and find media reports about his murder trial.
But the prosecutor, Gerrie Nel, cast doubt on many of the psychologist's claims. He asked why Mr. Pistorius was able to give a British TV interview if he was too shattered to speak to the court. "Isn't that a man in control?" he asked.
Mr. Scholtz said the TV interview was done in "different circumstances." But Mr. Nel shot back by noting that a television interview was different because it would lack any of the cross-examination that exists in court.
Mr. Nel, a famously bulldog cross-examiner, was skeptical of the claim that Mr. Pistorius was too weak and lethargic to testify in court. He recalled that Mr. Pistorius had confronted a police investigator during a break in his trial, accusing him of failing to do his job. In prison, he was verbally aggressive to a prison nurse and pounded her desk with his hand, he said.
Mr. Nel repeatedly questioned the notion that Mr. Pistorius was remorseful for his actions. He asked the psychologist whether Mr. Pistorius now admitted that he had murdered someone. But the psychologist gave seemingly contradictory answers, suggesting at one point that the question of intent was merely a "legal nuance."
In one of his answers, Mr. Scholtz said Mr. Pistorius now accepted that he had intentionally killed the person behind the bathroom door, even if he didn't know who that person was.
But in other answers, Mr. Scholtz gave a version closer to what Mr. Pistorius argued during his murder trial: that he had fired accidentally and unintentionally after hearing a noise and pointing his gun at the door.
Mr. Nel also questioned why Mr. Scholtz's assessment of Mr. Pistorius had failed to mention a report by a prison psychiatrist who said the former Olympian had been "verbally violent and aggressive" in his early weeks in prison. By neglecting to mention this report, Mr. Scholtz showed bias in his testimony, Mr. Nel said.
Mr. Scholtz replied that it was normal for a prisoner to be " angry" in the early stages of his imprisonment, but he said Mr. Pistorius was not a "violent" man.
As he entered and left the courtroom, Mr. Pistorius twice approached the bench where his dead girlfriend's family were sitting, including her parents, Barry and June Steenkamp. But they refused to make eye contact with him.
Geoffrey York