Pretoria – It was only a few minutes into prosecutor Gerrie Nel’s cross-examination of pathologist Jan Botha when my friend messaged: “Is being rude the only way to win a criminal trial?” he asked.
Defence advocate Barry Roux’s “I put it to you” pales in comparison to what Nel had been putting out.
“I ask questions – you answer them,” he had told Botha. He corrected the witness by telling him: “It’s not you may be wrong, you are wrong.”
When Botha protested, “I’m not here to win the case or lose the case for either the State or the defence”, Nel replied “I beg to differ”, implying Botha had simply aligned his testimony to suit Oscar Pistorius’s version.
When Nel had been building the State’s case, he was unassuming. He seemed like the poor cousin of Roux, who media monitoring company Data Driven Insight found had received nearly three times the amount of attention.
