Media & supporters wait for Oscar Pistrius outside court

 Sentencing procedures were expected to start on Monday after the Paralympian was convicted murder.

After 5am, all parking spots around the court, along Madiba Street had been taken up by outside broadcast vans.

In raincoats and holding umbrellas, news presenters and reporters were crossing live outside the court.

Several Tshwane Metro Police officers were also outside the court, controlling the flow of traffic in the busy street.

Pistorius, the former athletics maestro now a convicted murderer, will learn this week how long he is to spend behind bars

for killing his model girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.

Last year, the Supreme Court of Appeal overturned Pistorius’ culpable homicide conviction and instead convicted him of murder for shooting dead Steenkamp on Valentine’s Day, 14 February 2013.

A murder conviction carries a minimum of 15 years in prison in South Africa.

Pistorius fired four shots at Steenkamp through a locked toilet door at his Pretoria home in the early hours of 14 February 2013. The model and reality TV star died at the scene.

Double amputee, Pistorius, whose legs were amputated below the knees as a child, had testified he mistook Steenkamp for a burglar when he fired the deadly shots.

In his trial broadcast around the world on television in 2014, Judge Thokozile Masipa sentenced Pistorius to five years in prison for culpable homicide, the South African term for manslaughter.

He was released under house arrest at his uncle’s luxurious Waterkloof home after spending one year in the hospital wing of Kgosi Mampuru II prison in central Pretoria.

But the Supreme Court of Appeal overturned Masipa’s culpable homicide judgment in December and instead found Pistorius guilty of murder. In March, the Constitutional Court denied Pistorius the right to appeal that conviction.

Masipa will now sentence the fallen athlete for murder. Once the new sentence has been handed down, Pistorius will return to Kgosi Mampuru II prison, which houses some of South Africa’s most brutal rapists, murderers and apartheid-era assassins.