Not well.
You can read a more complete version of his statement here. The main issue: Pistorius spends much more time talking about how upset he is than about how sorry he is. He uses the SorryWatch-unapproved terms “since this tragedy happened” and “things that happen” rather than the declarative, first-person, owning-it phrase “since I killed her.” (He’s not disputing that he killed his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, though he has apparently changed his story about the timing and the number and sequence of shots fired.) He talks about his horrible nightmares, his utter terror since the incident, his family’s history as victims of violence, his absent father, his mother’s belief that firearms were essential for safety, his own history as a crime victim, his need to call his sister to come sit with him in the middle of the night. He draws an indelible image of sitting alone in a cupboard in the wee hours, cowering in fear, waiting for his sister to arrive to comfort him. He talks about how Reeva used to pray for him, and concludes, “My religion is what’s got me through this last year… my God is my refuge.”
Granted, a public apology to the parents of the person you killed while you’re on the stand during your trial for killing her is performance art. Perhaps Pistorius’s lawyers insisted he use the passive voice and ambiguous “what happened” to try to keep the image of him as a killer out of the courtroom. Recasting the powerful athlete as someone weak and fearful was presumably a conscious strategy, done to counter the prosecution’s presentation of texts between the couple that portrayed Pistorius as an angry, jealous, easily-triggered boyfriend (with an established gun problem and a lying problem) who yelled at and shamed his partner publicly. But the self-pitying, ownership-of-the-offense-lacking apology comes off as insincere. Even worse is the fact that Pistorius spends a much greater portion of time explaining, Dear-Officer-Krupke-style, why his past environment disadvantaged him and brought him, inevitably, to this terrible pass. The overall effect is of a person who feels sorry for himself, not for his girlfriend or her family. And hey, God is there for him. (Where was God when Steenkamp was killed, one wonders? What did her parents think of Pistorius’s gratitude that God “got [him] through the last year”?) Finally, the notion that Pistorius’s very first thought every single day is of Steenkamp’s family sounds a little eyebrow-raising. If I were on trial for murder, and had turned my lover into a bloody pile of meat (even accidentally), my victim’s family might be my third thought of the day. Might be.
Research has showed that in the courtroom, particularly in criminal cases, an apology that’s deemed insincere, incomplete or disingenuous can be bad for the defendant; a genuine apology, on the other hand, can lead to more lenient sentencing. This may be especially true in murder trials: “Remorse,” wrote Cornell Law School professor Jeffrey J. Rachlinski et al, in a 2013 paper analyzing apologies in various courtroom settings, “played a larger role in the ultimate sentence than the perceived heinousness of the crime.”
As Rachlinski and colleagues point out, more research on apology in the courtroom is needed. I’m also curious about the intersection of fame and apology: Do celebrities who apologize badly in legal situations experience more lenient outcomes than regular people? Is there incentive for famous people to apologize in a half-assed way rather than an authentic way, or not at all? Is there a difference in judges’ vs. juries’ responses to celebrity apologies?
Regardless, watch Steenkamp’s mother’s face in the video above. Judging by her pinched expression, brittle posture and tight mouth, Pistorius’s apology isn’t working for her at all. We’ll have to see if it works for the judge.
EDIT! In other sports apology news, several Facebooking SorryWatchers and emailers pointed us to Boomer Esaison’s apology for judgy comments he made about Mets player Daniel Murphy taking three days of paternity leave after his wife’s c-section and missing the first two games of the season. Good apology! Clear, shows ownership, demonstrates an attempt to make personal as well as public amends. (Esiason tried to call Murphy and did speak to the Mets owner and the PR chief to say he was sorry.) On the “learned something, won’t do it again” front, he points out, twice, that the March of Dimes, an organization he works with, educated him about why he said something dumb. (Esiason’s son has cystic fibrosis, and Esiason works with the March of Dimes as well as with his own foundation, which has raised $22 million to combat the disease; he’s by all accounts a devoted and involved father.) Esiason doesn’t grovel — he points out what he did and did not say in his original comments. You don’t have to snivel and scrape to apologize well; Esiason is entitled to say he was misrepresented in the media, because he was.
(I went back and listened to the original broadcast: Esiason clearly says he would have made a different choice, and sounds like a paternalistic douche, but he does not say Murphy did the wrong thing. He added, unprompted, that Murphy is legally entitled to two weeks paternity leave — and took much less.)
In his apology, Esiason repeatedly says specifically that he’s sorry for putting Murphy and his family in an uncomfortable situation. His cohost on that show, who has much more to apologize for, did the bulk of the talking and went much further, has not apologized.
Granted, Esiason is not on trial for murder — he’s in the business of outrage and airtime-filling, aka talk radio. That’s a setting in which it’s a lot easier to say off-the-cuff dumb things, and there’s much less at stake when you say you’re sorry for them. Which does not take away from the goodness of the apology.
