Judge Thokozile Masipa has once again drawn public ire in the Oscar Pistorius case. Yesterday in the Pretoria High Court she sentenced the disgraced former Paralympian to six years in jail for the murder of Reeva Steenkamp - a sentence regularly handed down to "burglars and stock thieves".Watch the moment Oscar Pistorius was sentenced here:Pistorius's previous conviction of culpable homicide, also handed down by Masipa, was overturned by the Supreme Court of Appeal earlier this year.Pistorius was released from prison last year after serving a year of his five-year sentence.He has now returned to prison and will remain there for at least three years.Legal experts said Masipa's reasoning was "solid" but her "leniency" shocked some.Llewellyn Curlewis, of the Law Society of the Northern Provinces, said: "Sentencing is never an exact science but the unfortunate thing is that, instead of looking at a [well-known] face in the dock, the court should have asked: 'If Mr X had committed the same crime would the sentence have been the same?'"There are similar murder cases in our lower courts in which magistrates sentence people to life. Sentences of six years are what you see given to burglars and stock thieves."But constitutional law expert Marinus Wiechers said six years was not lenient.He said: "Given all the evidence, the fact that he was remorseful, a first-time offender, can be rehabilitated and that the crime was not premeditated, Masipa took a sound approach to arrive at her decision ... ."The sentencing hearing was fraught with emotion.Reeva's father, Barry Steenkamp, spoke outside court, saying he wanted never to return.Masipa, in deciding on an "appropriate sentence", said the mitigating factors outweighed the aggravating circumstances - and so necessitated a deviation from the minimum sentence of 15 years of imprisonment for murder.She believed Pistorius had shown remorse for his crime.Masipa considered Pistorius's disability, the fact that he had no prior criminal record and his apology to the Steenkamp family. She felt he could be rehabilitated.Masipa said that although murder was a serious crime, a long prison term would not serve justice "in this case".She said: "While society's interests must be taken into account in terms of punishment - which is imposed, unpleasant, painful and uncomfortable - to ignore the facts of the case is an injustice."An uneasiness on a sentence could be an injustice and when that uneasiness leads to a conviction, that's an injustice."She said the courts were courts of law, not of public opinion.Public opinion cannot determine length of sentence:..