By The Guardian Editorial Board
The eventual delivery of justice on a sex offender, Olawale Olarewaju, after he was practically abandoned in prison for eight years, speaks volumes of the crass misnomer in Nigeria’s justice administration system. The case in review is more pathetic because it is a criminal case in which the victim and her relatives probably had foreclosed getting justice. Under normal circumstances, criminal cases are to be tried without undue delay, so that the innocent is not unduly deprived of his right to liberty inordinately.
After all, justice delayed is justice denied, as the saying goes. When a criminal justice system consistently fails to fast-track the dispensation of criminal justice over the years, its consequences for society and citizens can be very grave and disastrous. Nigeria’s deplorable criminal justice system not only arises from delayed justice but also from the outright perpetuation of injustice, including unlawful arrest and the endless detention of awaiting trial inmates (ATM) in Correctional Centres without bail, arraignment, trial, and sentence.
Recently, Justice Rahman Oshodi of the Lagos Sexual Offences and Domestic Violence Court, Ikeja, Lagos, sentenced Olawale Olarewaju to life imprisonment for defiling a 12-year-old girl who has now attained the age of 18 years. She had testified at the court a year after the incident. Before sentencing the accused, the judge frowned at the abusive way the convict was abandoned at the Ikoyi Correctional Centre for eight years without arraignment and without trial.
The delay in justice was caused by the inability of the Ikoyi Correctional Centre officials to produce the convict in court for arraignment between 2016 and 2019, despite the issuance of a warrant to that effect. On September 18, 2019, Justice Nwaka struck out the suit against Olarewaju, bearing the suit No. LD/2359C/2016 for want of diligent prosecution; yet the accused person, as he was then, was kept in Ikoyi Correctional Centre for eight years until he was produced in court on January 3, 2023, for arraignment.
Instead of bringing the accused timely for arraignment and trial in court, the Ikoyi Correctional Centre kept him in detention since 2016 and only brought him to court for the first time in 2023. It is obvious that the Ikoyi Correctional Centre’s dereliction of duty was responsible for the detention of the convict in prison for eight years.
The catalogue of instances of derailed, denied, and delayed criminal justice in this country is simply nauseating. From keeping Awaiting Trial Mates (ATM) and detaining criminal suspects in suffocating tiny cells without arraignment and trial, preferring trumped-up charges against criminal suspects, protracted criminal investigations, failure to apply the protocol provided by law in the remand of suspects charged with indictable offenses to the non-availability and non-production of prosecution witnesses to proffer evidence to support the charge brought against the defendants, the anomalies characterising Nigeria’s criminal justice system seem to know no bounds. The bad situation constantly defies remedial measures embarked upon by the government and many non-governmental organisations.
A visit to one of the Correctional Centres in Lagos with Zarephath Aid, a Lagos-based NGO providing pro-bono legal services to wrongly and unjustly detained prisoners aimed at facilitating their freedom revealed shocking oddities, inhumane treatment of ATM, and manifest injustices in the Correctional Centre. To begin with, three-quarters of the prisoners languishing in the Correctional Centre are ATM, many of whom were picked by policemen on patrol in their operational vehicles and carrying out mass arrests of ‘suspects’ who end up in the Correctional Centre.
It is commonplace to see policemen round up young people and search their bags, laptops, and other devices to ‘find’ incriminating evidence of their involvement in one crime or another. Sadly enough, many of the young persons are driven to the nearest police station and detained there or charged for various offences despite the victim’s protestation. Not infrequently, the police aim at extortion and where this fails some investigating police officers (IPOs) threaten to detain ‘suspects’ out of circulation for a long time.
However, the most tragic aspect of Nigeria’s criminal justice system is the detention of criminal suspects in the Correctional Centre for years without arraignment and without trial. Zarephath Aid narrated that in one of their visits to the Correctional Centre, they met a young man who was arrested by the police on his way back from work. He was accused of armed robbery, which he denied. At the Police Station, he was asked to provide N150,000 (One hundred and fifty thousand Naira only) to purchase his bail, but he pleaded that he did not have such an amount of money. In fact, he told the police that he worked as a trainee clearing agent in Apapa, Lagos Wharf, but the police waved his pleas aside. He was charged later with armed robbery and remanded in prison custody. His arrest was in 2000. But in 2005 when the advice from the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), Lagos was released, it stated that the man had no case of robbery to answer. The court discharged him. He had wasted five years of his life in a dungeon where he was kept without little or no food.
Another chilling case involved 34 ATMs who had been unjustly detained in a Lagos Correctional Centre. One of the inmates there was a young man who had stayed 12 years in prison awaiting the DPP’s advice. The DPP’s officers told the court that the police refused to forward the duplicate case files of the inmates to their office in line with the law. Dissatisfied with the injustice of the case, the then Chief Judge of Lagos State, Hon Justice Ade Alabi immediately ordered the young man’s release. His fellow prisoners who were similarly released by Justice Alabi had stayed between eight years and 10 years in illegal and iniquitous detention.
The organisation had to intervene in another case involving three suspects who had been arrested for conspiracy and robbery by the dreaded Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) in 1999. They were remanded in prison custody, and one of them died not long after they were remanded in prison. However, it was discovered that the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) had issued legal advice in 2000 stating that the remaining two suspects had no case to answer and therefore should be set free. The police, however, hid the advice from the court. Eventually, a duplicate copy of the legal advice was presented to the court, and the court relied on it in granting the two remaining suspects their freedom. Prior to that, the two suspects had endured an additional gruelling five years in custody due to a police officer’s negligence and inefficiency.
To be continued tomorrow.
Culled from The Guardian
